


Old Magic

by squintly



Series: Old Magic [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Magicians, Alternate Universe - Napoleonic Wars, Anal Sex, F/M, Fairies don't need lube, Hux and Kylo plot to take over the world, I do not personally ship Reylo, Inspired by Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, It was necessary for the plot, M/M, Masturbation, Please Don't Hate Me, This is a Kylux fic that happens to have a bit of Reylo in it, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-28 18:53:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7652848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squintly/pseuds/squintly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the first time in three hundred years, Hux felt the call. </p><p>The spell was crude, boorish; a plain tallow candle, words mumbled and mispronounced, none of the courtly gestures to which Hux had once been accustomed. He came anyway, if only to see who, in the Christian year 1803, would think to summon a fairy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Virginia

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is heavily inspired by Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but there are considerable differences in the universe; for example, magic is wide-spread, fairies are only *mostly* jerks and there are a considerable number of them. 
> 
> Also, due to the manner in which I have formatted this fic (god damn it AO3 why don't you have part as well as chapter options for individual stories) there are author's notes scattered through the text itself. These are mostly there to provide context, translations or explanations for certain things, and in one particular case, brag about the algebra I did in an effort to make this fic historically accurate. Because that is the number one priority when it comes to semi-pornographic fanfiction.
> 
> This is also a complete work; it will be updated at 6 PM Mountain Time every day until it's done. 
> 
> Thank you very much for reading; I hope you enjoy.

 

**Virginia**

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

For the first time in three hundred years, Hux felt the call.

 

The spell was crude, boorish; a plain tallow candle, words mumbled and mispronounced, none of the courtly gestures to which Hux had once been accustomed. He came anyway, if only to see who, in the Christian year 1803, would think to summon a fairy.

 

A boy, as it happened. Perhaps sixteen years old – Hux had never been good with human chronology – and tall for his age, lanky, with pale mole-dotted skin, ears two sizes too big and black curls like so many horns. He glanced around the messy candle-lit study with large searching eyes the color of molasses. Seeing it – so far as the boy could tell – unchanged, a furrow appeared between his angled brows. With a meticulousness belying by his age, he repeated the ritual, lighting a second candle on the plain iron candelabra with a taper already burned low.

 

Again, Hux felt the pull. He stepped closer on silent invisible feet, circling around to stand behind the youth now pouring over the ancient book before him with a pouty frown. On a whim, Hux reached out, one long-nailed finger tracing down the seam of the boy's well-tailored black coat with the lightest of touches. The boy raised his head. Though he could not see between the boy's long hair and his high starched collar, Hux knew the hairs on the back of his pretty long neck were standing on end.

 

"What an odd little bird," Hux said, dropping the enchantment which shielded him from the boy's questing gaze. The youth whirled, almost toppling the candelabra as his back hit the desk. With his eyes wide and his full lips parted he was a pleasant picture indeed. "Your master should be ashamed. Your spell-work is awful."

 

The boy stared at him. So did most mortals, upon their first meeting. They found him unsettling, with his fire-red hair and his electric blue eyes and the golden shimmer dusting his cheeks where a human blush would be. Yet the boy looked as much upon his clothing as at him, eyeing his gold-accented red jerkin, his slashed red-and-black sleeves, his shimmering white hose. It occurred to Hux, for the first time, that in the last three centuries, mortal fashion may have changed.

 

When he finally spoke, the boy's low voice cracked. "He never taught us about fairies. He says you're–" the boy swallowed "—you're too dangerous."

 

"And yet here we are," Hux replied. Despite his words, the boy didn't seem afraid, a faint flush of something akin to shame rising to his broad cheeks. "Name it, then. Whatever you desire so _very_ badly."

 

As he spoke, Hux stepped into the boy's space, pleased to see his eyes flare and his blush deepen. His hands, large and blunt-fingered and stained with ink, gripped the edge of the desk.

 

"I," the boy began, then swallowed again. "I want to learn."

 

Hux blinked and tipped his head to one side. " _Learn_?"

 

The boy's fingers flexed. "Magic."

 

Nothing had surprised Hux for a very long time. The feeling was delightful, like sunshine on spring leaves. Already, he was glad he came.

 

"Is that not what your master is for?" he asked, twinges of glorious curiosity curling into his voice.

 

The boy's blush turned angry, old resentments bubbling under his skin and in his sweet brown eyes. "He won't teach me. He says I'm not ready. I've been doing weather charms and scrying spells for years, it isn't fair."

 

"And you want more," Hux replied, tilting his head the other way and studying every curve, dip and mark of the boy's face, the way a palmister studied the lines of a hand. "You _deserve_ more."

 

"My grandfather was the greatest war magician who ever lived," the boy said in a dark, flat voice. "I'm not going to spend the rest of my life helping housewives do laundry."

 

 _Power, then_ , Hux thought. The fashion may have changed, but the ambitions of men had not. Asking to learn was a roundabout way, but not untrodden, and certainly not without its amusements. And there was something hard under the baby softness of the boy's face, like a beak peaking out from a cloud of puffy down.

 

Affecting a friendly smile for the boy's benefit, Hux extended a hand. "Then the bargain is struck."

 

The boy reached out. At the last moment, he hesitated, glancing at Hux with wary eyes.

 

"At what cost?"

 

"A token," Hux assured him, the words coming to his lips like old friends long missed. "A gesture of gratitude. Nothing more."

 

Instead of relaxing, the boy drew himself up and crossed his arms tightly across his chest. "Tell me."

 

Hux nearly laughed. He hadn't laughed in centuries.

 

"Clever little bird, aren't you?"

 

To his amusement, the boy's chest puffed, like a crow fluffing its feathers before a prospective mate. By all rights and rituals, Hux should have spun another platitude, never quite untrue but deceptive all the same. He found he had no wish to. He wanted to see what this scruffy little fledgling would do with the truth; whether he wanted enough to bear the cost.

 

"A third of your life in the Faerie Court. It has been far too long since someone joined our revels. And a finger."

 

The boy balked. "A finger?"

 

"Just a little one," Hux said, the smirk that pulled at his lips as genuine as his expressions ever were.

 

With his arms still pulled tight to his chest, the boy glanced down at his hand, fingers curling in the fabric of his coat. On another whim – he was not an impulsive creature, and yet, as he had said, here they were – Hux brought his hand up to trail a knuckle down the long melancholy curve of the boy's cheek. He had forgotten how warm humans were, how soft. Fleshy little things, full of hopes and dreams. The boy's lips parted again, the deep pits of his eyes flaring. His fingers relaxed.

 

"You will put your grandfather to shame," Hux promised, purring like the snake in that silly Christian fable. "There shall be nothing you cannot do. The stones will be yours. The trees will be yours. The sky will be yours."

 

The boy looked at him. The first human face he had seen in three hundred years. There was more daring in those burnt-sugar eyes than the rest of the Earth put together. Watching him bring it to its knees would be the most fun Hux had had in years.

 

The boy clasped his hand.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

That night, Ben collapsed half-dressed onto his cot, a dozen new spells whirling through his mind like firecrackers. In a few scant hours he had learned more from his new fairy friend than he ever had from Uncle Luke.

 

Laying on his stomach, he stared at his hand, and the flat smooth space where his little finger should have been. Eventually the candle guttered out and he was left in darkness, his skin a ghostly shimmer with three flexing claws. He never even realized he was falling asleep.

 

The ballroom loomed before him, a vast expanse of polished black marble enclosed by slanted walls of the same rising to a point vanished in deep darkness despite the angular slashes of platinum-hard white light scattered across the lower reaches like the clawing of some great beast. In the center stood a steep pyramid, an echo of the room itself but for the flattened top and the empty black throne upon it. And around the pyramid, whirling like leaves in white and black and silver, were dancers.

 

There were men in doublets and jerkins and hose, heavy silver chains around their necks and ornate swords at their waists. Women in square-necked dresses, full skirts heavy with embroidery and diamonds glittering in their hair. Women dressed like men, men dressed like women, androgynous creatures who could have been either twirling in perfect lockstep with the rest. A thousand people moved in perfect synchronicity, like cogs in some grand machine. None of them had reflections. Nothing did.

 

As he stared, his fairy friend stepped up from behind him. His clothes of black and red and gold had been replaced by sparkling white, tiny crystal beads glittering on his jerkin and slashes of silver fabric under his moon white sleeves. Had he walked into the court of Henry VIII, he would have been beheaded for outshining the king. In this place his hair flared even brighter, his eyes such a sharp blue they stung.

 

"A bit underdressed," the fairy said idly, glancing at him only briefly. "You're a poor dreamer."

 

Looking down, Ben realized he still wore what he'd gone to bed in, his hand flying to grasp the shoulder of his half-buttoned sweat-stained shirt and his bare foot hooking around the other as if he could hide the fact that he only had one boot. His face burned.

 

"Brave and bashful. How odd," the fairy mused, raising his hand to snap his fingers. The sound echoed strangely in the massive room Ben only then realized was entirely silent. "There. One must keep up appearances."

 

The texture of the fabric under his hand changed, shifting from soft linen to slithery silk. Black and silver, he saw, his entire ensemble the mirror image of the fairy's picked out in onyx and sable. His hand tightened on the slashed sleeve, then loosened, the space where his little finger would have been like whole in the world.

 

"I don't understand," Ben said as the fairy took his wrist and lead him out onto the dance floor. The others made room for them without missing a step. "I thought I had time."

 

"You do," the fairy replied, arranging Ben's arms as if he were a doll. His touch was hot and cold at once, like an electric spark flickering across his skin. "When you are awake. When you sleep, you are mine. For this night, and all the nights to come."

 

Ben's heart stuttered in his chest. If the fairy noticed the blood burning under his cheeks, he gave no sign.

 

"Now then," the fairy said, stepping back and dropping into a graceful bow. "Repeat after me."

 

Ben tried. His feet were clumsy and his mind was on other things – the sharp line of the fairy's jaw, the echo of his words, the amused crinkle in his eyes whenever Ben stumbled.

 

The fairy caught him. Every time.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Hux was there the next day when young Wren – the boy had not given his true name, and he had not yet earned something as auspicious as _Crow_ – slouched out into the sunlit yard where his master waited. He perched invisibly on the shingle roof of the sprawling whitewashed house, watching the slowly assembling children mill about. Amongst them Wren looked more like a stork, all gangly limbs and nose.

 

After a long while, a man with a graying beard and a cream waistcoat emerged from the house, carrying a wide pewter bowl filled with slightly grainy water. As he placed it carefully on the low trestle table in the center of the yard, the children formed into a wavering queue, Wren taking up the rear. One by one, they came to kneel or even stand on the bench, reaching across to carefully quarter the water's surface with pudgy little hands and peering into it like squint-eyed moles. The scrying spell was simple enough, elementary really, yet some of them still took several tries to form any kind of image, and when they did they achieved only colorful shadows, fuzzy and dim. Each 'successful' attempt was greeted with a chorus of cheers and clapping, both from the children and the seemingly ever-smiling man behind the table. He had a word of praise for each of them; 'Good job, Eliza' and 'Well done, Simon' and 'Very good, John', each platitude much repeated.

 

Only Wren did not join in the ridiculous celebrations. Dread radiated from him in waves. Each step towards the table became increasingly tortured, until the gap between him and the next child spanned several paces. His master glanced at him, but said nothing, until all the other students had finished their exercise and only Wren was left.

 

"Still angry with me?" the master asked, sweeping his hand across the bowl to clear away the previous scrying.

 

"No," Wren replied, drawing a hand from his pocket and sketching a quick cross over the water. Though he was wearing black leather gloves, an image appeared immediately, clear as crystal; some woman with her hair done up in braids, sitting at a sunny kitchen table and reading a book.

 

"Gloves in August," the master noted, again dispelling the image. "Taking it a bit far, don't you think?"

 

Wren didn't reply, instead shoving his hand back from whence it came and turning to leave. As he did so, the padded finger of his glove caught on the edge of the pocket, sticking straight out before folding back and slipping inside. His master almost didn't notice. Almost.

 

"What happened to your hand?"

 

Wren flushed. He was not a good liar. "Nothing. I'm fine."

 

 _Fly away, little bird,_ Hux thought to himself. _He has no hold over you_. And yet Wren did not, standing there with his shoulders around his ears while the man stared him down with hard blue eyes.

 

"Ben," his master said, "what did you do?"

 

Hux sat back. _Ben_. A strange coincidence. A thousand birds, and he had chosen the one that rhymed.

 

"Nothing," 'Ben' said again, finally attempting to walk away. The man circled to stand in his path, once and then again. "I didn't do anything."

 

"Show me your hand," the master demanded.

 

"No." A third time, the boy tried to pass. The master grabbed his wrist.

 

One of the cantrips Hux had imparted upon his young charge the previous evening was a variation of one he already knew, designed not to levitate small objects as Wren or Ben or whatever he preferred to be called had been taught, but to push them sideways with no small amount of force. It wasn't in itself dangerous, and when the boy unleashed it upon the master it did little but push him back a few steps. His grip on Wren's wrist slipped, caught on the glove, pulled it away.

 

Even without the magic, even if Wren had managed to hide his hand in his pocket immediately instead of his panicked pawing, there was still the padded finger. The master stared at it with mute horror.

 

All play had stopped. The children gathered, invariably by their teacher, regarding Wren with wide frightened eyes. The boy seemed to want nothing more than to collapse in upon himself, shoulders curled as far forward as his bone structure would allow and face levelled squarely towards the ground. He stopped trying to put his hand in his pocket. Against the black of his coat, his three fingers seemed very pale.

 

"Ben," his master said again, " _what did you do?_ "

 

A flush bled across Wren's face, sudden anger sparking in his eyes. His hand curled into a fist.

 

"You wouldn't teach me anything."

 

" _What did you do?_ " his master asked for the third time, striding forth to hold the padded glove before Wren's face.

 

"You wouldn't teach me anything!" Wren snapped again. "What was I supposed to do?"

 

The master grabbed Wren by the lapels of his jacket and yanked him forward. Wren was taller than him by a wide margin, and the downward force of his master's grip forced him to stoop even further.

 

"Tell me you didn't. _Tell me you didn't_."

 

The man did not yell. Wren flinched all the same, and said nothing.

 

The master let him go. Stepped back. Shook his head.

 

"I deserve more," Wren said, parroting Hux's words. Coming from his mouth, they sounded considerably less certain.

 

For a long moment, there was dreadful silence. Again, Hux thought _Fly away_ , and again, his little bird did not. The master closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, seemed to come to a decision that weighed on his shoulders like stone.

 

"Get out."

 

Wren looked at him, dark eyes widening. "Uncle—"

 

"You brought a fairy into the world," the master said in a low voice, angry and disappointed at once. "It will destroy everything and everyone around you. You can't be here."

 

Wren took a step forward. "Uncle Luke—"

 

"Get out!" the man barked again. Tears glistened in his eyes. " _You can't be here._ "

 

Wren quailed, hurt blooming across his face. He didn't cry. Looking at the children, looking at his uncle, he hardened, chest working like a bellows. Hux sat forward. Would his fledgling sing, he wondered, or squawk?

 

Wren turned and ran.

 

 _So_ , Hux thought, mildly disappointed, _still in the egg._

He was already in the attic by the time Wren lit the candle, leaning against the wall by Wren's bed. He appeared immediately, raking his eyes over Wren as if considering him for the first time.

 

"What took you so long?"

 

"Nothing," Wren said, stepping back around the desk. "Teach me how to fly."

 

"You're a still young for that, little bird," Hux said, pushing off the wall and smiling at the whip-crack of irritation that snapped across Wren's face. "First you must learn to walk. Get me a mirror."

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

The fairy – Fox, as Ben had taken to calling him in his head, for his red hair and his blue eyes and the glittering sharpness of his teeth when he smirked – lay a hand upon his shoulder. Ben placed his palm upon the speckled silver surface of the hand mirror he'd taken from his mother's old room. He closed his eyes and focused on the words.

 

" _Let the light be parted,_ " he said in the Old Tongue, just as Fox had told him. " _Let the road be opened._ "

 

Nothing happened.

 

" _Otyana_ ," Fox scoffed, rolling his eyes. "Not _atyana_. Honestly."

 

Ben took a breath and tried again.

 

If a man could be blasted into dust and sucked through a straw while still retaining all his faculties it might have felt something like this. It wasn't pain, it was _beyond_ pain, a burst of violent sensation that left him gasping even as it vanished. For a moment he saw nothing but sparks.

 

Then it resolved into the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

 

They stood before a double of the mirror in his room, hovering at roughly head height behind them. Below their feet lay a streak of white stone so thin he could see through it to all the paths below, curving away in all directions in a mad tangling labyrinth, layer after layer after layer. Above them was the same, and before them, and around them, in all directions, curving ramps and spiralling staircases leading up and down, to nowhere and everywhere at once. Intermingled amongst it all were mirrors, of every imaginable description; tiny pocket mirrors, ornate floor-length monstrosities, accidental mirrors in the form of shiny bowls, silverware, pocket watches.  Links of chain, swords, raindrops, polished stones. In the distance, the surface of a lake, paper-thin and rippling gently, reflecting a sunrise that had come to Virginia long ago.

 

"The Kingsroads," Ben whispered, his voice still achingly loud in the reverent silence. "I didn't think they were real."

 

"Most things are, in one manner or another," Fox said, dropping his hand and setting out upon the path. Somewhere between Ben's attic room and here, his clothes had shifted from his black and gold and red to his sparkling white. Looking down, Ben was somewhat disappointed to realize he still wore his coat and trousers. "Where would you like to go? Vienna is lovely this time of year. Or it was, in 1502. Things may have changed."

 

"I—" Ben glanced back over his shoulder. Through the mirror, he could still see the cracked plaster of his ceiling, yellow in the dusty morning light. "I don't know. Away."

 

Fox bowed, gesturing for him to pass. "After you, then."

 

As they wandered from path to path, Ben spent equal time glancing into reflections and at his strange companion. Fox made no secret of watching him in return. Ben hadn't explained, and why would he? How _could_ he? His feelings balled up in his chest like tangled string, the mere effort of trying to put a name to them deeply frustrating.

 

He'd known exactly what would happen. Had a speech prepared. A list of things he wanted to say a mile long, a list of grievances going back to infancy. And yet when it came time, he couldn't find the words.

 

"We'll have to work on your pronunciation," Fox finally said as they passed a mirrored music box looking out onto a room full of sheaths of fabric and mannequins dressed in unfinished Parisian fashion. "And your vocabulary. Once you have the words, you can ask for anything, and no-one will be able to stop you."

 

"I didn't know it was an actual language," Ben replied, glancing over the edge at a wide basin reflecting a smattering of strange stars. "I thought it was just words."

 

"Just words," Fox scoffed, rolling his eyes again. "Did your master teach you nothing at all?"

 

Ben fell silent for a moment, staring at his feet. "I don't want to talk about him."

 

"Did he abuse you, then?" Fox asked casually, with barely a beat in between. "Beat you, touch you?"

 

"What?" Ben glanced at him and flushed. "No. Of course not."

 

"I could teach you how to kill him, if you like."

 

"I don't want to kill him!" Shoving his hands deep in his pockets, Ben quickened his pace. "Jesus Christ, I'm not a monster."

 

"In the future, I would appreciate it if you didn't use that name," Fox snipped, fixing him with a bright-eyed glare. "And it was just a suggestion."

 

Again, they walked in silence. They passed a dish like a swan in blue glass, a black lacquered vase, a silver fork reflecting nothing but velvet darkness. Eventually the silence grew too much.

 

"He's not…" Ben began, struggling and struggling and struggling. "He's not _bad_. He just… doesn't understand. He never wanted to learn magic. He had to. He doesn't know what it's like."

 

Fox turned his head idly, the tendon in his neck standing out for a moment. "The weak are always jealous of the strong."

 

Ben grit his teeth. "I don't know why I'm defending him. He never cared about me. He only took me on because of Mom. Just because he fought on the winning side of the war he thinks he gets to tell everyone what to do. He's always talking about making Southern magic 'respectable' again, getting away from voodoo and fairies and war magic. Going back to the way it was in England, with apprentices and schools and magical courts, like that was any better."

 

Fox smiled wryly, as if he had won. "I thought you didn't want to talk about him."

 

Ben felt himself flush again. "Shut up."

 

"He isn't your master anymore." Fox looked at him for the first time since they began their journey. "You're mine now. I won't fail you like he did. Although it is exceedingly possible that you might fail yourself, you're not exactly _intelligent_."

 

Ben shoved him. To his surprise as much as Fox's, the fairy stumbled backwards, foot catching on the edge for just a moment before he tipped over and fell.

 

It took an hour of running up and down staircases and ramps to meet up with him again. The effort was well worth the canine smile he received when he did.


	2. Lisbon, 1809

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this chapter a little early due to unexpected plans. Next chapter will be up at 6 pm Mountain Time tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

 

**Lisbon, 1809**

 

\--- --- --- --- --- --- ---

 

"Fox!" Wren shouted, rifling through the stack of leather-bound books and loose papers occupying the better portion of his desk. "Where the hell is Vin—"

 

"Right here where you left it, you dullard," Hux replied, pulling the book from a teetering pile with a wave of his hand. "I've told you a thousand times—"

 

"Put them back, I know, I know," Wren said, plucking the book from the air and flipping through it. "We need to hire a librarian."

 

"We do _not_." Hux flicked him in the forehead. Wren's hand batted at the air almost a full second after Hux's was already gone. " _You_ need to learn some bloody discipline."

 

"This isn't even—" Wren made a frustrated noise deep in his throat, snapped the book shut and tossed it onto his desk. "What am I looking for? Shape-changing spell, starts with a V—"

 

"Veracles?"

 

"That's the one!" Wren snapped his fingers and turned, eyes flickering over the wall of bookshelves. "Where—"

 

"North east bookshelf, second row, fourth book over." Hux rolled his eyes as Wren scampered over another pile of books to grab the indicated tome. "If you told me what you're trying to do, I could just—"

 

"I want to do it myself," Wren replied, his loose linen shirt pulling tight across his broad shoulders as he reached for the high shelf.

 

_I want to do it myself,_ Hux thought in a mocking imitation of Wren's deep voice, mouth moving silently around the words. For the last six years, those words were never far from Wren's lips. During lessons was one thing, _that_ Hux could understand, but Hux could have built them a _palace_ by now. Instead, they were renting a tiny room above a bakery, drowning in books because Wren _wanted to do it himself_.

 

"Do you—" Wren grunted, brushing a dead spider wreathed in web from the top of the tome "—do you know which page—"

 

"No, Wren, I have not memorized every single one of your two hundred and thirty one books," Hux snipped. "This may surprise you, but I actually have _other things to do_."

 

It was a bold-faced lie, but Wren didn't notice, long nose already buried in the book. A full minute passed before he finally spoke again, without looking up.

 

"Two hundred and thirty one?" he asked, thumbing through a series of pages. "I thought I had two hundred and thirty two."

 

"You did," Hux deadpanned. "You also have that leak in the ceiling you refuse to let me fix."

 

"I can do it myself," Wren mumbled.

 

Hux leant back against the desk, folding his arms over his chest. "I'm going to kill you one day. Blast you to pieces and feed you to eagles."

 

Wren hummed.

 

Their first night in Lisbon, Hux had offered Wren a handful of conjured gold, for a room and board and a change of clothes. Wren had refused him. He'd spent the night huddled in a doorway, a reflective charm just barely keeping the rain from soaking him to the bone, unable to sleep for fear of pickpockets and cutthroats and the rumbling of his empty belly. Hux had allowed it, dreaming of gilded thrones and a mighty empire to rival the magician-kings of old, and the story the huddled masses would tell for generations to come; _'He slept on a stoop in a far-away land, and one day he would be King'._

 

The next day, Wren went about helping housewives and scrying in puddles so passersby could catch a glimpse of family far away, little better than the common street magicians peddling fraud and hope from their dirty yellow tents. Hux had allowed that, too. He'd allowed the first book, and the second, and now here he was, six years later, watching Wren read, the only chair in sight scuffed and cheap and coming apart at the joints.

 

At least Wren was still pretty, in a vultureish sort of way, taller now and broader than he had once been, natural muscle braiding under his mole-flecked skin. Hux thoroughly enjoyed their evenings together, their brief excursions into the wider world, the moments when Wren's books failed him and he turned to Hux for help. Perhaps…

 

"There it is," Wren said suddenly, skittering back over the pile of books to stand at his desk. Hux sighed.

 

Shoving papers aside, Wren snatched an inkwell – thankfully closed – and placed it firmly in front of him, hand hovering above it with his long strong fingers splayed. Mouthing the words to a spell, he clenched his fingers tight and spread them again, three full times. Magic shivered. Curious despite himself, Hux leaned closer, watching the inkwell ripple and shift like a reflection in uneasy water. When it stilled again, Wren looked down and grinned.

 

The inkwell had become a small glass fox, black in the body with a red head and tail, and gold on its paws and the tips of its ears. Its eyes were tiny beads of blue opal, gleaming a dozen different shades as it looked around its new surroundings. With a languorous stretch, it yawned, revealing a mouthful of tiny moonstone teeth.

 

"What do you think?" Wren asked, his own toothy smile crooked and childish and proud.

 

"A passable demonstration," Hux replied cautiously, crouching to look across the desktop at the creature. It looked back, tilting its head in much the same way he did. "The animation is particularly well done. For a novice."

 

Wren shifted on his feet.  "I made it for you."

 

Hux looked up at him. A faint blush had bloomed across Wren's cheeks, and he scratched at his shoulder. Hux was reminded of the first time they met, and how little had changed; his ears were still too big, his lips too full, his eyes big and wet and burnt-sugar sweet.

 

"For me?" Hux asked with a raised brow.

 

"You know," Wren replied, gesturing ineffectually. He seemed to want to say more, his mouth working silently for a good three seconds before he settled on, "If you don't like it, I can make something else."

 

Hux said nothing. The fox capered about the desk, sniffing at ink spills and pawing at crinkles in the paper. There was gold on the tip of its tail, too, a little glass flame that flickered as it clinked to and fro. Abruptly, Wren reached out and picked it up, golden paws flailing between his fingers.

 

"I'll make something else."

 

" _No_ ," Hux said, far sharper than he had intended, especially given that he hadn't intended to say anything at all. "Your energy would be better spent elsewhere. Leave it be."

 

Looking at him, Wren set the fox back down. It shook, glittering glass fur fluffing up for a moment before rippling back down.

 

Hux was not entirely sure when the sun set, or when Wren eventually clambered into his ever-unmade bed. Only that when he eventually looked up, the ceiling was patched and all the books had been put away.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

The night after, Ben dreamed his way into the Faerie Court to find it changed. One of the walls was no longer smooth, but had a deep cubby carved into it, some three feet off the ground. Within the cubby was a little world; two-foot trees of emerald and jasper, jade grass and malachite bushes, a glittering diamond river and a rippling sapphire pond, below a shining citrine sun and gently churning moonstone clouds. Tiny crystal rabbits and quartz mice skittered from hollow to hollow, and small gemstone birds perched in the trees, singing tinkling little songs. Aside from Fox's voice, the birdsong was the only sound Ben had ever heard in this place. More than a few of the fairies had paused in their dancing to listen, the others – those who had not abandoned the dance entirely to watch the glass fox Ben had made tearing after the mice – swirling around them without missing a step.

 

"I had to put it somewhere," Fox said, stepping up behind him. "It was getting in the way."

 

Fox held out his hand, a thin smile twisting in the corners of his lips. Ben smiled back and took it.

 

For a long while, they danced in comfortable silence, stepping past each other and around each other and toward each other, palms just barely touching as they circled. Then, after some hours had passed, Fox spoke, so quietly Ben could barely hear him, even in the silence of the Court.

 

"No-one's ever given me a present before," the fairy murmured, his fingertips pressed to Ben's as a soft rose gold flush rose to his cheeks. "I think I quite like it."

 

Ben's heart pattered in his chest and he grinned.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

"Look at this one," Wren said, smiling and shaking his head. "'If you would please cause my mother-in-law to drown in boiling jam I would be extremely grateful'. What kind of magician do these people think I am?"

 

"An expensive one, if we're lucky," Hux replied as he held another one of Wren's many letters to the candle flame, watching the poorly spelled entreaty to turn a woman into a cat burn.

 

"Nope," Wren said with a sigh, tossing the letter aside. "Wants to pay me in turnips."

 

"This wouldn't be a problem if you didn't insist on spending your entire income on books," Hux chided, running his fingernail along the seal of another missive. "Books you do not actually need, let me remind you."

 

"I'm a magician," Wren replied. "Magicians need books."

 

"There were magicians long before the written word and there will be magicians long after." Hux looked over the letter. "Oh goody, another marriage proposal. I'll put it with the others."

 

As Hux burned the letter, Wren smiled. "There's an easy way out. I can marry rich."

 

"Please, as if there's a woman on Earth who could stomach you." Hux waved his hand and the ashes melted away. "When was the last time you brushed your hair?"

 

Wren pushed his hand through his mess of dark waves and chuckled, roses in his cheeks.

 

A firm knock rattled the door; not the outer door of the building proper, but the inner one separating Wren's little stronghold from the bakery below. Hux frowned, and Wren got to his feet.

 

" _Mago senhor?_ " the sweet soft voice of Wren's landlady called. "There is Englishman here to see you."

 

"Ten escudos on another soldier trying to catch his wife in the act," Wren said as he ambled over to the door.

 

Hux scoffed. "Absolutely not."

 

When Wren opened the door, there was indeed a British soldier standing there, in full red regalia holding his tall black hat under his arm.

 

"Kylo Ren, I presume?" the man said, holding his unoccupied hand out to shake. Wren didn't take it, but waved him in, closing the door behind him with a nod to the landlady. "Lieutenant Colonel John Davidson, eleventh—"

 

"I don't care," Wren said, waving his hand to call the silver bowl he kept tucked under his desk into his hands. "What's her name?"

 

The soldier blinked watery blue eyes at him. "Pardon?"

 

"Your wife." Wren hovered over the pitcher of water beside his bed with a gesture and began to fill the bowl. "I need her name."

 

"Apologies, sir," the soldier stammered, holding his hat in front of him. "You quite mistake me. I'm not here on a personal errand, I'm here on behalf of Sir Arthur Wellesley, Viscount of Wellington."

 

Bowl nearly full, Wren stopped the flow. "Wellington."

 

"Yes, sir," Davidson said.

 

"What does Wellington want with me?"

 

"The same thing he wants from all other magicians in the city, sir; your service."

 

Straightening, Wren laughed. "My _service_?"

 

Red cherries appeared on the soldier's cheeks and he straightened. "Having liberated the city from the French, Lord Wellington asks only that—"

 

"Wellington can eat his own shoes."

 

"Wren," Hux said warningly, earning him a sidelong glare.

 

"You shut up."

 

"Sir?" the soldier asked.

 

"Not you," Wren said with a dismissive wave, swirling the water out of the bowl and back into the pitcher. "Although you can shut up too. I'm American. This isn't my war."

 

"But it is _a_ war," Hux said as the soldier gaped around in search for the invisible man Wren was talking to. "You could use some practical experience. What have you been training for, if not this?"

 

"Another revolution," Wren replied half-jokingly, causing the soldier's thin blond brows to knit together. "Napoleon left me alone. I owe him the same courtesy."

 

"Sir?" Davidson dared. "Who are you talking to?"

 

"Courtesy?" Hux scoffed. "When have _you_ ever been polite? Besides, Napoleon can't rule the world. It belongs to us."

 

Wren smiled. "Are all fairies this megalomaniacal?"

 

"Fairies?" Davidson paled and crossed himself. "Sir, if you hold truck with fairies—"

 

"Fifty thousand pounds."

 

Davidson's mouth moved. "Sir?"

 

"I want fifty thousand pounds," Wren said, leaning against the desk and crossing his arms over his chest. "Or the equivalent in escudos. Whatever that is. What is that?"

 

"Approximately three hundred sixty six thousand eight hundred and forty seven," Hux provided, "depending on the market."

 

Wren looked at him. "What, really?"

 

"Sir, I…" Davidson swallowed. "I am authorized to offer you one hundred pounds lump sum payment—"

 

"That'll be fine," Wren said with another dismissive wave.

 

Hux sighed heavily. "This is why we're poor."

 

 

 

 

( _Author's Note: I did actual research for that currency conversion. I DID MATH. Also Wellington’s history is a lot more complicated than I thought and I don’t know what they would have actually called him in 1809 and adgojanrga my skills have failed me. Also also, Portuguese from Google Translate: “Mister Magician”_ )


	3. The War

 

**The War**

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Ben could have stepped through a mirror and come out a puddle on the front lines, but _no_ , he had to do things the _British_ way. Had to trundle over miles upon miles of dusty roads and slashed fields, listening to soldiers complain or worse yet, _ask him for things_. He learned very quickly to keep his scrying bowl strapped to his back and his mending spells to himself. The army would have bled him dry before they ever reached the battlefield.

 

At least they gave him a horse. That he wasn't entirely sure how to ride. And which whinnied and bucked whenever Fox popped up, not that he could really talk to the fairy anyway, not without the whole company crossing themselves and muttering oaths and the officers giving him grief. ' _Bad for morale_ '.

 

At least he still had his dreams.

 

"You reach the front lines tomorrow, don't you?" Fox asked as they danced. "Or have there been more delays?"

 

"Better not be," Ben muttered darkly. "If I have to fix one more wagon wheel I'm going to kill somebody."

 

Fox smiled as they circled, palms touching. "So long as they're French, I don't think your new friends will mind."

 

He'd started wearing a star sapphire at his throat. Ben wasn't sure when. Every night seemed very much the same, blending together into one long blur of practiced steps and swirling gowns, until he looked up and realized half the lords and ladies and assorted others wore rubies and emeralds and topaz along with their diamonds and onyx.

 

"You'll be with me," Ben said as they switched directions. "In battle."

 

Fox quirked his head to the side. "Frightened?"

 

"Bullets are terrifying," Ben groused. "I can't stop something I can't see coming."

 

"I'm not going to let you die to a little lead ball," Fox said, rolling his eyes. "I haven't put in all this effort to lose you now."

 

For a moment, the flow of the dance separated them. Ben had broached the subject of teaching the fairies something more conducive to conversation – the waltz, ideally, given that was the only dance Ben more or less remembered from his mother's long-ago lessons – but change came slowly in the land of the Fae, when it came at all.

 

"Remember what I promised," Fox said when they were reunited again, stepping past each other and back around. "The stones will be yours. The trees will be yours. The sky will be yours. I haven't fulfilled my end of the bargain. If I let you die now, the King will be _very_ unhappy with me."

 

 Ben paused mid-step. "I thought you _were_ the King."

 

For the first time in their long acquaintance, Fox laughed. It wasn't a practiced laugh, or an easy one, but it was honest, and it glittered in his too-blue eyes.

 

"Whatever gave you that idea?"

 

"I don't know." Ben flushed, rushing his steps to catch up with the rest of the dancers. "The throne is always empty. And you're… different."

 

"Not substantially," Fox said as they turned together.

 

"You're the only one who ever talks."

 

"We've been keeping our own company for three hundred years. We ran out of topics to talk of amongst ourselves long ago. Besides, they're all too busy paying attention to you."

 

Blush deepening, Ben glanced around. No-one overtly seemed to stare, but everywhere there were bright flashing eyes, and now that Fox mentioned it, he felt a certain sharpness in the air, as if he stood on the point of a knife. His shoulders rose and his steps faltered.  


“They’re jealous of me,” Fox continued, his bow lips drawing in one of his cruel smiles as he guided Ben in a wide turn, as if parading him before all the world. “The instant you wake up, they’re all questions. ‘What did your little bird do? Did he wear his waistcoat? Did he remember to eat?’ You’re they’re darling.”

 

Ben bowed his head, trying to focus on the dance and not the dancers, but his skin prickled and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He clenched his mangled hand into a fist. Again the dance pulled him and Fox apart and he found himself face to face with a tall, slender brunette woman, wearing a voluminous gown of black and silver with a string of garnets draped around her throat like droplets of blood. As their palms hovered close enough together for Ben to feel the electric heat of her body, she looked at him and smiled.

 

None of the fairies had ever directly acknowledged his presence before. His feet skittered sideways of their own volition and his shoulder hit a waifish man with a flare of burnt gold hair. The man looked up, thin eyebrows sharply arched, his androgynous partner glaring at Ben with eyes the color of an overcast sky. Ben backed away, right into Fox, the fairy’s long-nailed fingers lighting softly on his hips.

 

“Now, now, little bird," Fox purred, sending shivers ricocheting down Ben's spine. "Don't be afraid. None of them can touch you. You're mine, for this night, and all the nights to—"

 

Ben sat up in his bedroll, heart pounding and sweat beading on his forehead. Slowly, he drew his knees up to his chest, glad for the concealing dimness of the dying campfire. The soldier on watch glanced at him, but said nothing.

 

It took him a long, long time to calm down.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- -—

 

Hux expected to be summoned the next morning. He was not. He came anyway.

 

Wren always looked tired. He hadn't had a restful night for six years. This morning, the bags under his eyes were bruised and he walked as if he carried a cannon on his back, shoulders hunched and hands shoved deep in his pockets. The soldiers stayed well clear of him.

 

When the procession at last arrived at the camp, Davidson led Wren through a sprawling sea of low canvas tents to a tall pavilion, bright yellow and crenellated in the medieval style. Even before the soldier drew back the heavy silk flap, raised voices rang from within.

 

“If we just divert the river—”

 

“If we divert the bloody river the fields will flood!” an elderly man with a short wispy beard shouted, banging his fist on the table as Wren ducked inside. “We have to move the hill!”

 

“Move it _where_?” said another man, exceedingly tall and thin and pale, with straight black hair slicked back from his face and a silver hoop in his ear. “Azerbaijan?”

 

The original speaker, a portly man with a twirled blonde mustache and a carefully coiffed ripple of straw-blonde hair gestured to the rough map of the region laid out on the table in a frozen ripple of fanciful purple cloth. “If we just moved the river—”

 

Davidson cleared his throat. “Apologies, Sirs. Mister Kylo Ren, newly arrived.”

 

Five sets of eyes turned to glare at Wren with varying degrees of hostility. The bearded man drew himself up and huffed.

 

“Kylo Ren? I’ve never heard of him.”

 

“I have,” said one of the men who had not yet spoken, leaning back in his chair and propping his overly shiny black boots on the tabletop. He had a thick Portuguese accent, dark skin and an inexplicable green streak in his curly black hair. “They say he is mad. Or that he consorts with devils. To the unlearned they often seem the same.”

 

The mustachioed man giggled into his hands. The thin man smirked and the bearded one scowled, fluffy eyebrows nearly touching. Wren’s hand came up to grip his shoulder and he said nothing. Hux sighed. He'd hoped the shell had at least cracked, the last six years. Apparently he was wrong.

 

The fifth man did not smile, or scowl, or laugh. While the others wore robes of a variety of descriptions, he sat at the head of the table in heavy plate armor, covered in etchings and gilded whorls and runes. Thickset and aged, with deep lines around his face and broad streaks of ashy grey in his red beard, he fixed Wren with a steady stare.

 

“I see you’re missing a finger,” the armored man said in a thick Scottish brogue. “How did that come to pass?”

 

Wren started and shoved his hand back into his pocket, shoulders high around his ears. “Nothing. An accident.”

 

The thin man’s eyes narrowed and the mustachioed man, sitting with his back to the flap and therefore closest to Wren, scooted not-so-subtly away. The armored man’s expression didn’t change.

 

“Indeed?”

 

Wren said nothing.

 

Davidson coughed, already inching back out of the tent. “Gentlemen.”

 

Once the soldier was gone, the armored man returned his gaze to the fabric map before them.

 

“In Britain, dealing with the Fair Folk is grounds for a hanging,” he said, waving one gauntleted hand over the map. Little pips of red and blue light appeared, bustling on either side of the wide hill. “Perhaps you tell the truth. Perhaps you don’t. Either way, you have no place here. Good day.”

 

Wren flushed. _Burn him,_ Hux thought. _Boil him in his armor. Peck his bloody eyes out._

 

Wren whirled and stalked out.

 

 

 

_(Author's Note: Azerbaijan the country did not exist in 1809. The region was still called Azerbaijan, though, so.)_

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

The captain didn't complain when Ben snatched the sword from his belt, at least not after Ben started hacking at the wagon. Chips of unstained wood flew in every direction, stinging against Ben's face and disappearing into the thick well-trod mud. Soldiers formed a wide ring around him, some holding their rifles, others just watching, in curiosity and horror and amusement. He didn’t scream. He wouldn’t give the sons of bitches the satisfaction.

 

Taking a deep breath, he stepped back, forcing the anger down and down until it burned into sour ash in his stomach. Holding the sword horizontally in front of him, he muttered a few old words; “ _Let the edge be keen. Let the steel be strong.”_   The nicks in the blade — few of which were his doing, the officer’s swords were little better than cheap kitchen knives — rippled away. Ben tossed it back, the captain just barely catching it by the hilt.

 

“You’re quite the character,” a deep female voice called, “aren’t you?”

 

Turning, Ben, for the first time in many years, found himself looking _up._ The woman must have had three inches on him, and a good twenty pounds if the thickness of the arms beneath her black frock coat was any indication. Her pale gold hair was chopped short, the longest wave barely brushing her thin blonde eyebrow, and she wore breeches and a blue waistcoat with silver buttons. If Ben hadn’t spent the last six years dancing with the mismatched Faerie Court, he might have thought she was a man.

 

“Phasma,” she said, extending a thin-fingered hand. “Do you prefer Kylo, or Ren, or both?”

 

Ben looked her up and down, pushing his own hands into his pockets. “Ren.”

 

“Ren,” Phasma repeated, apparently not the least bit disappointed. She clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. I have a bottle of very good brandy and my other companion doesn’t drink.”

 

Without waiting for him to follow, she walked away. The soldiers gave her a wide berth, shooting her sidelong looks almost as suspicious as the ones they gave him. After a moment, Ben stalked after her. It wasn’t as if he had anywhere else to go.

 

Behind the yellow pavilion was a smaller, decidedly more mustardy tent, made of faded canvas and muddy around the bottom. When Phasma flipped the flap open with a gesture and ushered him in, he realized it was full almost to bursting with crates and barrels and chests. Perched upon one of the crates with a leather-bound ledger in one hand and a fountain pen in the other was a mousy young man with straight black hair wearing a charcoal grey cassock. Seeing Ben enter, he offered a small-lipped smile and a wave.

 

“Kylo Ren, Dopheld Mitaka,” Phasma said, flipping the tent flap closed and securing it with a toggle. “Dopheld Mitaka, Kylo Ren.”

 

“A pleasure,” Mitaka said cheerily.

 

“Who are you?” Ben asked as Phasma pushed past him to flop down onto one of the chests, reaching between two crates to pull out a bottle of amber liquid.

 

“Outcasts,” Phasma replied, the cork twisting out of the bottle as she waved her fingers over the mouth. “Useful enough to keep around, yet not quite _respectable_ enough to have a seat at the table. Much like you, I imagine.”

 

She took a swallow of the brandy, then held it out for him. Ben hadn’t had much time for alcohol over the last six years, but if ever there was a day he needed a drink, it was this one. The mouthful burned, but he managed to get it down without coughing.

 

“Try not to take it too personally,” Mitaka advised, brushing a strand of stray hair out of his face with the back of his pen. “The Order of Merlin is a thousand years old. They’re set in their ways.”

 

Thinking of star sapphires and garnets, Ben huffed. “That’s not much of an excuse.”

 

“It’s really not,” Phasma agreed, taking the bottle back. “So, what exactly is wrong with you then? You have a temper, clearly — please tell me you socked Ozymandias in his ugly maw.”

 

“Oh!” Mitaka exclaimed, sitting forward. “You turned Gaius into a ferret!”

 

Again, Ben hesitated. The taste of brandy lingered in his mouth. Slowly, he pulled his hand out of his pocket, holding it up with his fingers splayed. Mitaka raised a curious eyebrow, while Phasma sat back on her perch.

 

“I see,” she said cautiously. “I didn’t think there were any of your kind left in the world.”

 

Ben found himself standing a little straighter. “There weren’t. I’m the first in three hundred years.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Mitaka said, quirking his pen. “First of what?”

 

“Summoner,” Phasma provided, still eyeing Ben. “According to lore, fairies take a part of your body to anchor you to the Faerie Realm. A finger, usually, or a toe.”

 

“Oh,” Mitaka said, and then, “ _Oh._ ”

 

“I tried once,” Phasma said, putting the bottle to her mouth. “My father didn’t want to teach me magic, so I stole one of his books. Lit a candle, said the words. Nothing happened.”

 

“I did the same thing,” Ben said, leaning against a high stack of crates. “Only mine work—”

 

His weight against the stack upset its balance and the uppermost crate tipped back, on the edge of falling. Ben whirled, stumbled, flung a quick spell to keep the crate from crashing to the ground. Phasma chuckled and Ben’s cheeks burned.

 

“Well, your grace,” she said, reaching up to clap him on the shoulder again, “so long as your pixie keeps to its own, I welcome your company. We pariahs ought to stick together.”

 

“I’ve always been curious,” Mitaka said, setting aside his book like an eager child. “What are fairies like? Do they really have little wings? Do you have to feed them cream? Does scattering salt for them to count really work? Do they—”

 

“Take a breath, Doph,” Phasma laughed. “For Christ’s sake.”

 

“Sorry,” Mitaka blushed, chewing at his bottom lip. “I get excited about things.”

 

Phasma passed Ben the bottle again. He took another swallow. This one burned less, tasted better. When he finished, Mitaka was still staring at him expectantly. After a moment, he made another little ‘oh’ and moved over on the crate, patting the wood next to him.

 

Ben sat down.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

“I thought you might summon me today,” Hux said as he ambled up to stand by the newly dreaming Wren. “Apparently I wasn’t needed.”

 

If Wren noticed the bite in his tone, he gave no sign, carding a hand through his hair and glancing around at the assembled company. Over the years he had learned to dream himself proper accoutrements, but now those lessons were seemingly forgotten, his feet bare and still dirty from his long journey and his shirt half untucked. At least he hadn't fallen asleep in his drawers.

 

"They're launching an offensive tomorrow," Wren said, shifting from one foot to the other. "It was… busy."

 

 _Busy_ , Hux thought, clenching his teeth even as his expression remained carefully neutral. The brandy stink clung to Wren like a fog, clawing at Hux's nose every time he took a breath. His eyes shone with it.

 

"I see," Hux said, holding out a hand as if nothing was wrong. Wren took it without question, without raising his gaze.

 

Wren was clumsier than usual tonight, preoccupied or half-drunk, it didn't matter. He got the steps wrong, turned left when he ought to turn right, forgot which hand went where. On any other night, Hux would have mocked him – after all these years he should have been able to manage without tripping over his own feet – but this night, Hux held his tongue.

 

Thoughts hissed through Hux's mind like steam. There were too many things to be angry about. That Wren had not summoned him. That Wren had talked about him to total strangers like some _tale_ , some juicy piece of gossip to be shared – _No, faeries don't have wings, mine is tall and thin and ginger and he has the bluest eyes you've ever seen, he isn't the nicest person in the world but he isn't cruel, either, not like in the stories._ That Wren had let the monstrous woman touch him, had touched her in return, once the brandy kicked in, had wrapped his arm around the mousy little twat's shoulders like they were old friends, awkward though it was. That Wren had fled, that Wren had allowed a trumped-up old curmudgeon to threaten his life and done _nothing_ , had not even spoken in his own defence, as if the threat meant nothing, as if Hux had not lost more bargainers than he could count to little men with pitchforks and rope. That Wren had woken up as if his touch were a nightmare.

 

He did not touch Wren tonight. Not even the brush of a palm. Wren noticed – he could see his shifting eyes, feel him pressing forward to close the gap – but said nothing.

 

"Busy," Hux said, aloud, darkly amused by the jerk of Wren's shoulders. An hour had passed – he thought he was safe. "Doing what, exactly?"

 

One of Wren's pretty little blushes flared across his cheeks, spreading to tint his ears a dull pink. "Um… Fixing boots, mostly."

 

That was true, Hux knew, after or rather between the drinking and the camaraderie and the _stories_. Funny how Wren couldn't stand being the center of attention here, yet he was happy enough to hold his new friends in thrall. _He calls me Ren, I don't know why, but I like the sound of it. I don't think he has a real name, I just call him 'Fox'_.

 

"Fixing boots," Hux repeated dryly.

 

"Yeah," Wren said, and no more.

 

"Well," Hux said without a sneer or a change in his tone, "I suppose if that's all you're good for."

 

Wren paused in his steps. For the first time, he looked up, met Hux's gaze. _Fairies don't look like people. Almost, but not quite. Something about them feels wrong. Like giant dolls that move._

 

"What is that supposed to mean?"

 

"Nothing," Hux said. "I'm sure you're very good at it."

 

"You're the one who wanted me to come here in the first place," Wren groused, defensive, unmoving, the rest of Hux's brethren shifting around him and shooting Hux the occasional hard-eyed look.

 

"So you could make a name for yourself," Hux replied, a hint of anger seeping into his tone like poison, "not _fix boots_."

 

"It's your fault anyway!" Wren shouted, suddenly furious, as he had been before the wagon, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides. "They don't trust me because of you! If you hadn't taken my fucking finger—"

 

Hux left him. Flit away, beyond the Last Keep and into the endless forest of shadow and bones, before he could open his mouth or raise a hand or indulge some other mad reckless whim. As he stood beneath the towering ghosts of ancient trees, he pressed his hand against his chest, over his pounding heart and the long thin lump beneath his clothes.

 

He did not return.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

In the end, they moved the hill.

 

Just before dawn, all eight magicians gathered at the base of the hill, cannons arrayed behind them, loaded and ready to fire. Ben stood on the far left, Phasma and Mitaka providing a buffer between him and the suspicious glances of the armored man, who Mitaka had in a whisper informed him was known as Arthur. Gaius, the bearded man, had gone over the spell a full seven times. Ben already knew it, and knew the old man had the pronunciation wrong, but said nothing.

 

He’d lit a candle that morning. Fox hadn’t come.

 

“As one, now,” Gaius blustered, holding his hands out in a sweeping and utterly unnecessary gesture. “And quietly. No need to let the French know we’re coming, eh?”

 

Egbert, the man with the curled blonde mustache, chuckled.

 

Ben closed his eyes. He’d had little opportunity to practice earth-shaping. Little bits of sand and dirt were one thing; the living ground was another, and people tended to get angry when you moved their houses. If Fox had been here—

 

But he wasn’t. He hadn’t come. He'd disappeared, vanished like a shadow before a flaring flame, left Ben in the Faerie Court with a sea of people who refused to talk to him or even look at him no matter how loud he shouted. Ben had woken up shaking and lit the candle and _Fox hadn't come_.

 

For the first time in six years, Ben felt like he was alone.

 

“ _Hill, I command you_ ,” he said, his voice as sure and respectful as he could make it and wavering all the same. “ _In your tongue, I command you. Go before me as the wave before the storm._ ”

 

The earth responded, but not in the way he had intended. He could feel the stone twisting, grating, like a torturous sound just below the edge of hearing. It didn't know what to do – too many masters, their words wrong, ordering it this way and that. Gaius, seeing only that the spell had not had the desired effect, motioned for them to try again. They did, all but Ben, and the ground beneath his feet began to tremble.

 

On a strange instinct, he knelt. The grass quivered beneath his fingers. Energy pulsed, screaming, crying, on the verge of tearing itself apart. Phasma watched him with curious eyes.

 

" _Hear me, Hill_ ," Ben murmured, no spell that he knew – but once you knew the words, you could ask for anything. " _Be free_."

 

Before Gaius could wave on another round of spellcasting, the ground snapped. Stone cracked, screamed, a monstrous noise like the trumpeting of hell. The hill lurched forwards, sod rolling over the moving earth like fabric over a stone. Frenchmen who had camped in the lee of the hill suddenly found themselves on top of it, then rolling down the opposite side, tangled in tents and ropes, tumbling torches leaving trails of fire in their wake. Cannons clanged, men shouted, horses shrieked.

 

“Fire!” Davidson called.

 

Egbert threw himself to the ground as cannonballs thundered past them. The wind of their passing tore at the magicians’ robes, Ben’s hair, the crack of gunpowder quieter than the roar of the hill yet still terrible to hear. Gaius clapped his hands to his ears, shouting ineffectually into the din.

 

“Back!” Arthur ordered in a magically enhanced boom. “Magicians, back!”

 

The hill was still going. Ben could feel its joy. He ran his fingers through the grass and for a mad moment wished he could become it, could live in a simple world of dirt and worms and rain where running across an open field could be the grandest thing imaginable. No disapproving masters, no work to be done, no bullets whizzing past his head. He looked up, half expecting to see a French bayonet.

 

Instead he saw Fox, looking down at him with something akin to begrudging pride.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

As they slipped into the relative privacy of the yellow pavilion, Wren tugged off his cravat, drawing the strip of white fabric through his fingers then wrapping it tight around his palm as if it were a bandage. He had been jittery and distant ever since the battle, glancing at Hux but not speaking to him, though whether for the benefit of the celebrating soldiers around him or some deliberate slight Hux couldn't say. He decided, for the moment at least, to believe it was the former.

 

"Now do you know what you are?" he asked, stepping up to perch on the back of Arthur's chair, legs crossed and shoe resting on the table. "Or is the shell still too strong for your pretty little beak?"

 

Wren did not reply, standing with his back to Hux and his head bowed. A thread of ire twisted through Hux's chest like a molten crack.

 

"Ignore me all you want," Hux said, looking down at his long nails, as if it were possible for them to be anything less than perfect. "You summoned me for a reason, and it wasn't so you could obey the commands of stodgy old men who would rather see you hanged."

 

Wren's head rose. His hand tightened around the cravat.

 

"You weren't there."

 

Hux rolled his eyes and sighed. "Just because I chose not to appear—"

 

" _You weren't there_ ," Wren repeated, voice hard and harsh and strange. " _I didn't summon you._ "

 

In a flash, Hux realized his mistake. Before he could form the words of a reply, Wren was whirling, stalking towards him with flashing eyes like lightning behind brown glass. Hux slid off the chair, putting it between them, not afraid, of course – no mortal could hurt a fairy without the fairy's consent – but giving ground all the same. Wren grabbed the back where he had been sitting, wood creaking under his iron grasp.

 

"How long have you been watching me?" Wren asked in a grit-toothed growl.

 

 _Always_ , Hux nearly replied. But Wren wouldn't understand. He would think it was lewd in some way, wouldn't be able to see how after three hundred years of monotony _anything_ could be fascinating, from the gleam of the straight razor as Wren shaved to the way water beaded on his skin after a bath. Mortals were obsessed with their own perversions. They'd made the devil, just to have someone to blame.

 

"Please," Hux scoffed instead, "I have better things to than watch you potter about."

 

Wren leaned forward. Hux found himself leaning back. Even as his heart pattered his pride from this morning swelled; some of that downy potential he had seen that first meeting was finally showing through.

 

"You're a horrible liar," Wren grit. " _How long_?"

 

"When something interesting happens," Hux replied, and not untruthfully. The roll of Wren's shoulders was interesting, the tumbling fall of his hair, the way he chewed the inside of his cheek when he thought no-one was looking. "I told you from the start, you were mine."

 

Wren's jaw hardened. His short nails had left marks in the wood of Arthur's chair. " _At night._ "

 

Hux opened his mouth and found, for the first time in uncountable years, he wasn't sure what to say.

 

The flap shifted and Wren straightened, staring past Hux's shoulder as the thin magician – Ozymandias, he styled himself, as if he were worthy of the name – slipped in side, followed by Egbert, still dusting mud and grass from his purple robes. Seeing Wren, Egbert flustered, drawing himself up as tall as his small podgy body would allow.

 

"Mister Ren, this pavilion is for _Order business_ , you have no right—"

 

Wren flicked his eyes over to meet Egbert's and the man fell silent.

 

Hux couldn't help but smile. No spell, no words, just a look. Wren was proud, too, pleasure rippling up his spine in a visible shiver, his shoulders sliding back and his chin raising. For a beautiful moment, he looked like the king he was destined to become.

 

Then Arthur shoved his way through the flap and the moment shattered.

 

"What's going on?" the old man groused, shoving Ozymandias out of the way. Spotting Wren, his piggy blue eyes narrowed. "Apostate. Get out."

 

Though Hux clung to a fleeting hope, he was not surprised when Wren moved to leave. When Arthur grabbed Wren by the arm, however, when Wren _allowed_ him, did not yank his arm away but stood and waited for the man to speak – his heart flew to his throat and it was all Hux could do not to melt Arthur's ridiculous armor onto his fat body.

 

"You might be useful to Wellington now, apostate," Arthur said in a darkly, "but the war won't go on forever. I'll have you on the gallows by the end of it. Mark my words."

 

Wren looked down at him, expression level and strange. Then his other hand came up and lay over Arthur's, lightly, like a lady gently spurning a suitor.

 

"If you ever touch me again," Wren said in a tone that matched Arthur's, right down to the subtle purr of anticipation, "I'll snap your neck."

 

It wasn't the most eloquent of threats, but Arthur let him go all the same.

 

Hux grinned.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

_The stones will be yours. The trees will be yours. The sky will be yours._

 

Ben didn’t sleep much that night. No-one did. The rest of the morning went to packing up the camp and the afternoon went to marching, trying to make up for the four days the French had stalled their progress. When sunset came, they were still moving, and so the tents and campfires had to be set up in the dark, soldiers hurriedly shoving down rations or collapsing onto their bedrolls with empty bellies. Still restless, Ben wandered from fire to fire, watching, listening. Most conversation died when the soldiers saw him coming. They looked at him the way someone might look at a bloody knife.

 

He couldn't see Fox. Hadn't, since their conversation that morning. Part of him knew he was still there. Part of him always had.

 

"Give me your boots," he said to one of the men. The soldier's hazel eyes widened to saucers, but he obeyed. Ben gave them back better than new. Then he turned to the next. And the next. And the next.

 

Word spread quickly. He fixed more boots than he could count, and belts worn almost through, torn trousers and battered rifles and a bewildering array of uniforms, no two apparently alike. A crowd gathered at the edge of the firelight, ragged men clutching their ragged possessions to their chests and waiting for him to notice, not a one daring to speak to him. After a while, Phasma ambled in, sitting next to him and helping where she could, though the quality of her repairs weren't nearly as good as his. The soldiers didn't speak to her, either.

 

They couldn't get them all. Half the British equipment was falling apart and the other half had never really been together to begin with. But they did as many as they could, until Ben's head pounded and his stomach ached from the constant concentration. When he finally stood up and walked away, no-one dared complain.

 

"You did that just to spite me," Fox said as Ben opened his eyes to the Faerie Court, "didn't you?"

 

"You deserve it," Ben said. Fox smiled.

 

"My little bird, hatching at last."

 

Ben didn't smile back. "When I call you, you come."

 

Fox inclined his head and held out his hand to lead Ben out onto the dance floor. Ben didn't take it, crossing his arms over his chest.

 

"Say it."

 

Fox's lips quirked. He did.

 


	4. 1812

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has non-detailed depictions of rape in a wartime scenario, as well as magical and non-magical violence. Please read with caution.
> 
> (Also I am sorry this is late I am writing the sequel and time got away from me I am officially garbage)

 

**1812**

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

A cannonball smashed into the mud, sending up a vicious spray as it bounced and clipped a soldier in the chest. Blood on his boots and flecks of shattered bone on his long black coat, Wren ran past, slid to a stop, dropped to his knees. His hands sunk deep into the muck. A ripple tore through the earth, gaining speed and height until it hit the French lines like a wall. Men screamed and a cannon boomed a dull thud, the ball blowing out a section of earth but falling ineffectually to the ground, momentum spent. Over the ripple went, then down like a subsuming wave. Once it passed, there was nothing left but the occasional hand, twitching as its owner died.

 

The English let out a ragged cheer and surged forwards. The French soldiers who had a second ago been two lines behind readied their rifles, almost to a man leveling at the magician stalking towards them. Hux flit into the no-man’s-land, raised his hands, brought them together in a sharp clap as the French fired. The bullets fell from the air like lead raindrops.

 

“Ren!” Mitaka’s voice came on the wind, distant yet clear. “Magician on the eastern flank!”

 

Wren put his fingers to his throat. “I’m on my way.”

 

Casting the message into the air, Wren brought his hand down in a fist, then drew it back up again, muscles in his arms bunching and angular brows furrowing with the effort. The ground before him rose into a wide promontory, slope to the English and cliff to the French. Soldiers surged up it, kneeling at the edge to shoot down at the bluecoats like fish.

 

“Fox,” Wren called, holding out his hand as he stormed towards a gleaming puddle of old rainwater and blood. Hux flit to his side and took his arm, and they stepped through.

 

The silence of the Kingsroads was a hard thing after the din of the battlefield. Hux lead Wren down whisper-thin paths, leaping from one to another where it suited them, until they came upon another puddle reflecting sparking electric light. To the French soldiers surrounding it Wren seemed to boil from the earth like mist, force bursting from him before they could so much as turn and knocking them to the ground.

 

The enemy magician was little more than a girl, blonde hair in coiled braids and high-waisted white gown whipping in a magical wind. Lightning arced from her fingertips, jumping from one British soldier to the next. Mitaka had formed an earthen shield — a spell Wren had taught him — but only a dozen men or so could cower behind it, safe yet useless unless they ducked away from the cracking wall. The others were left to run and scream and die, trying to get in a lucky shot before lightning or a bullet found them.

 

“ _Mademoiselle,_ ” Wren shouted, stepping over a prone soldier to stride towards her. “ _Parlez-vous anglais?”_

His French was terrible — his troubles with languages extended to mortal ones as well — but it caught her attention. She stared at him, electricity crackling between her palms but held in check for the moment.

 

“ _Êtes-vous l'homme corbeau_?”

 

“What did she say?” Wren asked, turning his head to Fox without taking his eyes from the girl.

 

“’Are you the raven man’,” Hux translated with no small amount of amusement. “Your reputation precedes you.”

 

“ _Oui,_ ” Wren shouted back, then asked Hux, “How do I say ‘I want to talk’ again?”

 

“ _Je veux parler_.”

 

As Wren repeated the words, the girl considered him. Around them the battle had stalled, though cannons still roared elsewhere, French and English both holding their breath. If Hux was a good judge of human expression — and he increasingly was, the more time he spent in their realm — the French were by far the more worried.

 

“ _Serait-ce que vous étiez un Français,_ ” the girl called. _Would that you were a Frenchman._

 

“ _You’re good_ ,” Wren replied in French after consulting Hux. “ _I can make you better._ ”

 

The girl shook her head, slow and sad. Wren’s shoulders fell.

 

“ _Adieu, l’homme corbeau,_ ” the girl said, and unleashed a torrent.

 

Hux caught the bolt mid-air, gathering the energy before him in a sparking ball. His shadow stretched long over the churned ground. The French soldiers crossed themselves, scrambling backwards with terror in their eyes. Some of the English crossed themselves as well, but they held their ground. They knew he was on their side.

 

With a mighty shove, Hux sent the bolt careening back from whence it came. The girl raised a hand, a shimmering electric shield flaring from her palm, but too little too late. Her own energy followed the conduits from which it had been released, crackling through her nerves to burn her from the inside out. She barely had time to scream before she collapsed, branching trees of brutal red seared across her pale freckled skin.

 

Wren turned to the French soldiers. Those he had knocked down, barely risen to their feet, fell back to their knees. A handful of their fellows on the front lines followed suit, while the rest turned and ran. The English surged after them, unleashing every held shot and roaring vengeance for their dead. One man put a bayonet in the girl’s head as he passed, spitting on her corpse.

 

“Thank you,” Mitaka said as he jogged to Wren’s side, breathless and with mud smeared across his broad forehead. “We were in a right pickle.”

 

Wren didn’t reply, holding a hand out towards the dead girl. A swirl of his fingers and a muttered word, and the earth came up around her, drawing her down in a gentle embrace.

 

“I’ll take care of these.” Mitaka gestured to the kneeling Frenchmen and clapped Wren on the shoulder, grinning. “You go find someone else to murder.”

 

\--- --- --- --- --- -—

 

“No, it’s… It’s not…” Ben made a frustrated noise deep in his throat and reset his feet. “It’s one, two, _three_ , one, two, _shit,_ I’m sorry.”

 

“This seems very complicated,” Fox said, grimacing as he shook out his stepped-upon foot. “You’re doing something different every time.”

 

“I haven’t done this in eighteen years,” Ben groused, squaring off against the fairy again, his hand on the fairy’s waist and Fox’s on his shoulder. “I’m allowed to be a little rusty. Alright, it’s left, together, then back — you have to go forward. It should — We should be going in circles. I think.”

 

“Perhaps you should take Mitaka up on his offer,” Fox suggested, barely getting the toe of his shoe out of the way before Ben’s foot came down on it. “At this rate, we’re going to skip right past a waltz and invent something entirely new, which I believe would be a first for fairy-kind.”

 

“No, I can do this,” Ben insisted. “You just have to do exactly what I’m doing, only backwards.”

 

Fox rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue, and they managed a handful of steps before Ben overstepped again. Fox sighed.

 

“Well, I suppose you can’t be good at everything.”

 

“Shut up,” Ben grumbled.

 

Fox had built them a room. It wasn’t quite _theirs_ , per se, open to the Faerie Court on one side with the glass fox’s enclosure on the other, the benches along the walls often occupied by fairies marveling at the new view or just watching their fumbling curiously, but it felt more private than the massive echoing throne room. Less threatening. Which was a good thing — Ben would never have had the courage to do this in front of a thousand sets of watchful eyes. The three that were currently observing them were more than enough.

 

“You should stop asking them," Fox said suddenly as they faltered through another round of steps. “Anyone who betrays the French will betray us in kind, given the proper motivation. Never make the mistake of trusting the ambitious or the greedy.”

 

Ben huffed a laugh. “Does that include you?”

 

“My fortunes are inextricably tied to yours,” Fox replied without hesitation. “I would never do anything against your interests.”

 

Looking up at him, Ben dropped his brows and twisted his mouth into a half-smile. “You spied on me for _six years_.”

 

“I didn’t _spy_ ,” Fox huffed, a rose gold shimmer rising to his cheeks. “I… _observed_.”

 

The fairy didn’t blush often, but when he did Ben always found himself grinning; nothing in the world could do that, nothing but him. “You’re not still doing it, are you?”

 

The gold flush deepened and Fox straightened, throwing his shoulders back and raising his chin. “Of course not. I would never do such a thing.”

 

“Obviously,” Ben laughed. Fox was still a terrible liar.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

When Wren wrung the cloth out over his head, sparkling droplets slithered through his hair and down his broad back. Hux followed one closely, watching it glide down the curves and dip of Wren’s rippling muscles to soak into the black fabric of his breeches. He didn’t touch, but his fingers traced the shimmering trail the droplet left, just close enough to feel the pure heat radiating from Wren’s body. Though Wren had done this every morning for years, the trails were always different; over his shoulder, down his bicep, along his ribs to follow the curve of his hip. Tiny hairs, the particular tension in Wren’s muscles, the position of his body, the distribution of dirt and oil, the conditions of the room around him — there were too many variables to calculate, even for Hux. He could never tell where the water would go, what it would do. It never failed to enthrall him.

 

Rolling his shoulders, Wren took a towel from the small desk that adorned his tent and rubbed the damp out of his hair. That was unpredictable, too, the wild mess never quite falling in the same way. Some days Wren brushed it back into satisfying order. Sometimes he didn’t. A few months ago he had dared allow — dared _ask —_ Mitaka to hack off three full inches. Hux still hadn’t forgiven him, and for the rest of his days Mitaka would wonder why every razor and knife and pair of scissors he picked up was dull.

 

“Sir?” Davidson’s voice called from outside the tent as Wren’s fingers crawled up the ivory buttons of his shirt. Wren turned, staring through Hux in a way that made his chest mysteriously ache.

 

“What is it?”

 

“We have reports of a French caravan transporting cannons to Badajoz, sir. Lord Wellington would like you to handle it personally.”

 

Wren sighed and picked up his black silk waistcoat, slinging it over his shoulders. “Tell Phasma she has the camp while I’m gone. I’ll take Gaius and the Knights. Wait, no. Let the Order draw lots. Wouldn’t want to play favorites.”

 

If Davidson heard or appreciated the wry twist to Wren’s voice, he gave no sign. “Yes, sir.”

 

The party met at the edge of the camp. Wren’s Knights — or so they called themselves to annoy the Arthurian Order — knocked off a series of varyingly lazy salutes as Wren approached, black uniforms waving in a gentle spring breeze. The six soldiers Wellington had assigned to ‘keep an eye on the bloody crow’ had learned very quickly that Wren didn’t stand on ceremony, but old habits died hard.

 

“Guiomar,” Wren said as he passed the Portuguese magician loitering as far from the others as he could. “Drew the short straw, did you?”

 

Guiomar sneered wordlessly. In the last three years, he had grown a beard and put a green streak through that as well. It did not suit him.

 

Standing a little beyond the group, Wren crouched, threading his fingers through the grass. Raising his palms some two inches above the earth, he closed his eyes, mouthing a spell and opening and closing his fist three times. For a moment, nothing happened, and then from the ground burst two massive horses made of tangled grass and roots and earth, green and brown and white with black river-stone eyes. They whistled like wind through folded grass, pawing at the earth with flint hooves as Wren inched forward, held out his hands and did it again, and again, and again.

 

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Guiomar jeered, folding his arms over his chest as the Knights began slinging saddlebags over the creatures’ broad backs.

 

Wren picked up a heavy bag of his own, lay it over the back of the largest of the beasts, and hooking a foot into a loop of thick white root, hoisted himself up.

 

“You know what, Guiomar?” he said, giving the horse an affectionate pat. “I wasn’t thinking about you at all. How about that.”

 

Hux smirked.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- -—

 

The French had camped for the night in a small clearing, not quite big enough for their assembled company. The nine cannons they bunched in the middle, with the thirty men escorting them arranged in groups of four or five around the outside and amongst the trees. Ben crouched with Guiomar and the Knights far enough away for the French campfires to be nothing but a distant glimmer through the trees, peering down into his scrying bowl. With a swipe of his hand he moved the image to survey the surrounding forest; alder, mostly, old and tall and strong.

 

“We can’t take them all,” said Geoffrey in his cockney accent, adjusting the rifle slung over his skinny shoulder and wiping at his oft-broken nose. “Got a plan, sir?”

 

Not replying straight away, Ben looked up. The sky beyond the new leaves was overcast, a deep dull grey picked out in threads of gold and purple from the sun setting just under the clouds. In half an hour, they’d be in dead darkness.

 

“We will send in the soldiers first,” Guiomar said, flicking his black-nailed fingers over the water to show the camp from above. “While they are distracted, I will throw fire—”

 

“No,” Ben said, pushing himself to his feet. “There’s something I want to try. Be ready to cast if it goes wrong.”

 

“If it goes wrong?” Guiomar repeated mockingly as Ben drew a short candle from his pocket. “The mighty Lord Ren admits — what are you doing?”

 

Though the Knights had seen him do this a dozen times, half of them still drew back, and the youngest, a round-faced Irishman called Poddleton, crossed himself. Guiomar stood slowly, chin rising and tendons standing out in his thick throat.

 

With a snap of his fingers, Ben lit the candle, mouthing the words of the spell. As the light flared to life, it revealed as if from shadow the lithe form of Fox, leaning up against a tree with his arms crossed over his slender chest. Though Guiomar couldn’t see the fairy, he certainly felt his presence, taking a few stumbling steps back.

 

Fox smirked. “One of these days I ought to pop up and say ‘ _boo_ ’.”

 

Ben smiled back, bending to place the candle on the broad rim of his scrying bowl. “Could they even see you?”

 

“If I choose to let them,” Fox said airily, pushing off from the tree. “Lovely evening for a walk.”

 

Poor Poddleton crossed himself again, closing his eyes and clasping his hands in muttered prayer. Fox made a face at him, baring his sharp white teeth. Ben shifted to keep himself between Fox and the group as the fairy circled, more for the Fox’s sake than theirs.

 

“Remember promising me the trees?” Ben said. “Now would be a good time to deliver.”

 

Fox straightened, shoulders back and expression more than a bit haughty. “Trees aren’t rocks. You can’t _order_ a tree. But they may be persuaded, if you’re especially polite.”

 

“I shouldn't have a problem, then,” Ben replied with a smirk.

 

Smiling back, Fox pressed his palm against the rippled grey bark of the nearest tree. “It will be difficult. The Spanish have been logging this wood for centuries, and alders hold grudges. They have no love for men or man-shaped things.”

 

“Can we do it?” Ben asked, stepping closer to stand with the fairy by the tree.

 

Fox tilted his head. “We can do anything.”

 

\--- --- --- --- --- -—

 

Wren crept as close to the French encampment as he dared, alone and as vulnerable as he ever got with Hux by his side. He knelt at the base of the oldest of the alders, a massive thing a foot and a half thick around the base, with a healed-over wound seven feet off the ground where some long-ago woodsman had tried to fell her. Wren ran his hands down her trunk, over the mounds of her thick roots, feeling the energy coursing through the old tree’s veins.

 

“Above all, be respectful, if you can manage it,” Hux said, crouching at Wren’s side and whispering, though he had no real need — the French would never hear nor see either of them, unless he willed it. “Flatter her. And do not ask her to help _you_ , she cares nothing for the whims of men. Find a way to ask her to help herself.”

 

Wren nodded, took a breath and closed his eyes.

 

“ _Grandmother Alder,_ ” he murmured in the Old Tongue; not the best of starts. Hux would have gone with _Great Lady_. “ _Strong one. Fierce one. I kneel before you._ ”

 

“Don’t overdo it,” Hux muttered to him. Wren shot him a sidewards glance.

 

“ _These men have come to burn you_ ,” he continued. Too much, too fast, and not specific — the tree felt many men, and her alarm shivered in her branches, sending the last withered leaves of the previous autumn tumbling down around them. “ _They have come to cut you for their fires. They have come to cut your sisters. They have come to cut your daughters._ ”

 

“Careful, Wren,” Hux whispered as the tree made a sound, a long angry groan just on the edge of hearing. Two of the nearest Frenchmen looked up, saw nothing but shadows, went back to their dice.

 

“ _Kill them_ ,” Wren said.

 

The tree trembled, roaring an angry oaken roar. The men looked up again, just in time for white roots to shoot up through the earth and tangle around their folded legs. One was immediately dragged beneath the loamy surface. The other managed a shout before a root wrapped around his neck and strangled him, his face flaring an ugly dark red in the firelight. Their three companions scrambled to their feet, dropping tin cups and heels of bread.

 

Wren ran to the next tree, running his hands over her and whispering the same fiery words, more roots thrusting through the soil to snag at boots and legs and idle hands. The Frenchmen to a man stood in blank shock as fellow after fellow disappeared beneath the earth. Such magic had not been done in the world for three hundred years. It must have seemed the stuff of nightmares, the woods come to life to reap their revenge.

 

One of the soldiers proved quicker than the others, and as Wren ran to the next tree, he drew a pistol and shot the first. The old alder shrieked, branches lashing at the darkening sky. Roots coiled around his ankles, then burrowed into his boots. He screamed and fell to one knee, tearing at the white tendrils only to find them piercing his hands as well, thick veins writhing under his skin as bright crimson blood stained the wood.

 

More soldiers shot; shot the trees, shot the ground, shot each other. One grabbed a torch and thrust it at a cluster of roots. They shrunk back before others slithered up his back to wrap around his neck, snapping it like a twig. An officer in an overdone hat slashed at the roots with a nicked saber and the whole forest shrieked. Before the man could swing again, there were roots around his wrist, following the veins through his skin. Thin white fingers sprouted from his mouth like shoots and he slumped, held up by the devouring wood for a moment before it began to drag him down. Another officer stumbled and fell, trying to crawl backwards away from the growing carnage only to find the tree behind him, far from those Wren had provoked, had joined the fray. She wrapped her roots around him like a lover. He didn’t even put up a fight.

 

“Masterfully done,” Hux admitted, watching one poor soul try to lift a pistol to his temple only to have his hand dragged down, roots burrowing into the spaces between his fingers. “Now take your little friends and run. Trees can’t see the color of a man’s coat.”

 

Wren hesitated. His eyes gleamed like pools of boiling oil. Then he tore his gaze away from the screaming soldiers in front of him, nodded, and raced back the way he had come.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

The others didn’t ask what Ben had done. He was glad of that.

 

Part of him knew he should be horrified. Not just with what he had done — with what he had _created_. According to Wellington’s reports, the hill he’d set loose was still roaming across Portugal, destroying crops and upending houses. Who knew how long the forest would rage.

 

He wasn’t horrified. He was _euphoric_.

 

Through the darkness and into the dawn, he and his Knights raced, the flint hooves of their untiring horses striking sparks on stones. His coat flared behind him, wind in his hair, and all he could think was, Y _ou’re next_. The stones, the trees, the sky. There was nothing he couldn’t do.

 

He’d never dreamed Fox’s dream. The fairy wanted him on a diamond throne, with a crown of sunstone poppies on his brow and the world bowing at his feet. Ben had only ever wanted to learn, not rule. But _power_ … ‘ _You’ll put your grandfather to shame_ ’, the fairy had promised him. He hadn’t thought it was possible. But Vader had never roused the trees.

 

He couldn’t stop grinning.

 

“Ren!” Mitaka’s voice came calling on the wind. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t magical; Mitaka was bouncing his way across the field on the back of a draft horse he was only barely keeping in control, waving desperately. Ben pulled up and the knights followed suit, their grass horses pawing at the untilled soil. Mitaka lowered his arm and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank God, I can’t feel my legs.”

 

“What are you doing?” Ben asked, turning his impatient mount in a circle. “What happened?”

 

“The siege broke,” Mitaka said. His voice was low and trembling, deep furrows between his rounded brows. “Phasma took down the wall but the bloody French mined the bloody gap. Two thousand were dead when I left. Could be double that by now.”

 

“Jesus,” cursed Cosgrove, mis-matched blue and brown eyes going wide.

 

“They have magicians?” Guiomar asked, nudging his horse forward. It didn’t move.

 

Mitaka shook his head. “Canister shot and bayonets. And the Order. Bloody idiots keep throwing fireballs, roasting our own men as much as theirs."

 

“We have to get back.” Pickering shifted in his saddle, aristocratic voice hard. “How fast can these things go?”

 

“Not fast enough.” Ben was already slipping from the saddle. “I’m taking the Kingsroads.”

 

“I’ll come with you,” Guiomar said, scrambling down.

 

Ben ignored him, reaching into his pocket for his candle. Finding it empty, he realized he’d left it, and his scrying bowl, back in the angry wood. “Damn it. Fox?"

 

"I'm here," Fox said, appearing in the midst of them. Mitaka's horse reared and he tumbled from his saddle, landing with an oomph.

 

"We need to get to Badajoz," Ben said, though he was sure Fox had heard, "right now."

 

Fox nodded and held up a hand to the sky, curling his long-nailed fingers into a fist and pulling down. From the pale dawning blue came a sudden torrent of gleaming rain.

 

Guiomar frowned. “Your fairy came without you—”

 

Before he could finish his sentence, Ben grabbed Fox’s hand and strode into the rain.

 

By luck or destiny, the path from their raindrop to a fountain in Badajoz was short, just a few turns, a staircase and a narrow leap away. The moment they emerged in the square the stink of blood and smoke and gunpowder filled Ben’s nose, strong enough after the vaguely electric air of the Kingsroads to make him cough.

 

No cannons boomed. Gunshots rang out, but only occasionally. The screaming, however, was constant.

 

Ben picked a direction and ran. He needed to get to a wall, get a viewpoint, figure out what was going on. He raced around a corner and saw — redcoats. Half a dozen or so, in the streets, two of them streaked with old blood.

 

“What’s going—” Ben began before he realized what they were doing.

 

One had a bottle of brandy at his lips, drinking so deep wobbling bubbles rose through the amber fluid. Another had a grip on a woman, snarling at her as he tore at her dress. She screamed and clawed and scratched, and he hit her, hard enough to split her lip. A little boy shrieked “Mama!” and thrashed in the arms of the man holding him back. Grabbing the boy by his mop of brown hair, the soldier unceremoniously smashed his head into the stone piling of a nearby house. His little body fell limp. The other three soldiers, bags made of bedsheets filled with silver and gold slung over their shoulders, laughed.

 

Ben raised his hand. He didn't mean to, exactly. It just happened, like muscle memory or a reflex. The would-be rapist gagged, released the woman, clawed at his throat. She dropped to her knees, cradling her boy in her arms.

 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” one of the other soldiers asked the choking man. Another turned, saw Ben, skittered backwards.

 

“Fucking hell, it’s the crow!”

 

The four soldiers with their bags of loot and half-empty bottles turned and ran. Not the one who’d killed the boy. He tripped as his feet came out from under him, rising into the air until his flailing hands hovered a foot off the ground. Fox waved his other hand and his screaming, cursing, filthy mouth healed over like a wound.

 

Ben’s hand shook. The rapist’s chewed-blunt fingernails drew streaks of crimson as his feet left the ground. Blood vessels burst in his cornflower blue eyes. He had a thin scar on his lip that gleamed white against his purpling skin. His tongue protruded from his mouth.

 

He went still.

 

Ben let him drop, like the boy had dropped. He went to the woman, to the boy. She looked at him with tear-red eyes, a bleeding bruise on her cheek, her breasts hanging bare from her torn dress.

 

“ _Mago!_ ” she shouted like a curse, clutching her dead son to her chest. “ _Mago! Arder en el infierno!”_

 

Ben had no idea what that meant. Fox could have told him. He didn't ask. He stood, walked away, left the woman to her grief. As he passed the floating murderer, he waved his hand and snapped his neck.

 

Fox flit away, disappearing like a shadow in sudden light to reappear on the roof of the tallest of the nearby buildings. He flit somewhere else, left Ben alone, striding down the street with trembling hands and bile in the back of his throat. A British soldier stumbled from a house still doing up his trousers. The moment his feet touched cobbles they opened up beneath him, a deep rift that closed over his head before he could scream. Rounding a corner, Ben found another man lighting the end of a rag — a bit of torn petticoat — stuffed into the end of a bottle. As he reached back to throw it into a house, it burst over his head. He made it halfway down the street before collapsing, pieces of charred uniform scattered in the street.

 

Fox appeared next to him again. “They’re looting the city. British dead are piled on the walls twenty deep. The officers are trying to keep order, but the men are killing them too.”

 

Ben said nothing.

 

Following the screams, they found another cluster of looters. One had a woman shoved up against the wall, fucking into her like an animal. With a wave, Ben tore him away from her, threw him across the street, smashed him into the wall opposite so hard the brick shattered. Another had a knife to the throat of a sobbing man. Fox held out his hand and his arms snapped back like broken wings. A third drew a pistol, aimed it at Ben’s chest.

 

Ben held out his hand. The man didn’t fire. Instead, arm trembling, eyes wider and wider until they were all whites, he raised the pistol to his temple.

 

"Ren!"

 

The gun clattered to the ground, the soldier skittering off like a frightened mouse. Phasma ran down an alley to stand next to him, grabbing Ben's wrist and forcing his hand down.

 

"What are you _doing_?" she asked. "Those are _our men_."

 

The woman sank against the wall, the man rushing to her side. She shoved him away. Phasma took Ben's shoulder and turned him away, grabbing his chin when his head didn't follow. She couldn't turn his eyes.

 

" _Ren!_ Are you listening to me?"

 

"They deserved to die," Ben said in a strange hollow voice that didn't sound like his. "They were hurting her."

 

"That's what a court-marshal is for," Phasma said as if she were frustrated with him. "It's ugly and it's unfortunate, but we can't defeat Napoleon without an army. These men just watched their brothers die by the thousands. They're only human."

 

A deep cold settled in Ben's chest. He heard Fox scoff. The man was trying to comfort the woman, trying to stroke her hair and her arm and her knee. She spat at him, struck him, cursed him. “ _Cobarde! Chucho! Tú no hiciste nada!”_

 

"Human isn't good enough," Ben said.

 

"Well, it's all we have," Phasma replied. "This is just the way war is, Ren. The way it always has been. Now, come with me to Wellington, and maybe, just maybe, I can keep you out of prison."

 

Ben looked at her. She was dusty and bloody and singed around the edges, and suddenly Ben didn't know her at all.

 

His hand wrapped around her throat. She grabbed his wrist again, heat pouring through her palm to blister his skin. He let her go with a hiss, throwing out a wave of force to knock her back. She stumbled, but didn't fall, pale brows dropping into a steel-eyed glare as she summoned flames into her hands.

 

“I don’t want to fight you,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, “but I will, if I have to.”

 

“I’m going to punish them all,” Ben replied flatly. “You can’t stop me.”

 

“Maybe not.” She dropped into a low stance like a boxer ready to jab. “But I’m sure as hell going to try.”

 

Sending a gout of flame galloping towards him, she ducked out of the way just in time to avoid the ground opening up beneath her. Fox flit into the path of the fire, diverting it to lick against one of the nearby houses. Ben leapt over his own gap, throwing up a low stone wall to trip her even as she jumped and spun, throwing a whirling vortex of flame directly towards him. Fox diverted that too, but not quickly enough to keep it from singeing the arm of Ben’s coat. The wool caught and Ben struggled out of it, ducking another gout of fire Fox barely turned aside as Phasma hopped up onto a set of steps, bearing down on them with a torrent so hot the flags began to soften.

 

“Kill her!” Fox shouted over the roar of the flames.

 

Ben could have snapped her neck. He could have slammed her into the door, bashed her until every bone in her body was broken, called on the stone to swallow her up. He didn’t.

 

Something moved in the corner of his eye. He turned to find the man holding the soldier’s pistol in a shaking hand.

 

“ _Mago_ ,” the man cursed, and pulled the trigger.

 

It felt, at first, like Fox had flicked him hard in the chest. He looked down, saw a dark gleam spreading through his waistcoat, a hole with the red-stained threads of his linen shirt poking through. He fell to his knees.

 

The torrent of flame stopped.

 

"Ren?" Phasma said, confused.

 

Breathing in, Ben found himself choking, coughing, blood in his lungs and his throat and his mouth. Phasma took a step towards him and Fox flit to his side, pressing a palm against the shining bloodstain on his chest.

 

A muttered word and they were somewhere else.


	5. Australia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the Reylo chapter. You have been warned.

 

**Australia**

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Wren lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. He had been laying in bed and staring at the ceiling for the vast majority of his waking hours for two full weeks. In his dreams, he sat on a bench and stared at the wall.

 

He wasn’t unresponsive. Were he catatonic — it wouldn’t be _easier_ , but it would be a different kind of hard. When Hux spoke, his eyes flicked towards him; never directly _at_ him, but to the floor at his feet, the wall past his elbow. When Hux had slapped him in the Faerie Court eleven days into the abiding silence, shouting “ _Say something, you dullard,”_ Wren’s jaw had clenched, but he didn't reply, did not even raise his hand to the red mark blooming on his cheek.

 

“I’m sorry,” Hux said for the hundredth time, perched on the unsanded footboard of the simplistic bed. Wren’s eyes flicked. “I promised I would protect you and I didn’t. Please look at me.”

 

Wren’s eyes flicked back.

 

Hux was not accustomed to guilt. He was not accustomed to feeling _responsible,_ certainly not for a doddering mortal fool like Wren. He was not accustomed to _pain_ , or —

 

The flap of undyed canvas separating this half of the ramshackle little house lifted and the girl came through, holding a bowl full of vaguely unpleasant-smelling soup. As she sat at the edge of the bed, she tucked a stray strand of brown hair behind her ear and smiled. Wren looked at her and the corners of his lips ticked up in a wan little smile of his own.

 

Jealousy was an old friend to Hux, yet always he had endured it knowing that ultimately, he was superior. Phasma and Mitaka would and had eventually betrayed them, Hux could teach Wren magic no-one had ever set down in ink, he was more striking than any human girl, stronger, more interesting.

 

But not kinder.

 

When she found Wren bleeding on the floor next to her well-cared-for metal bucket, she hadn’t hesitated, dropping to her knees in the red puddle and slicing open his fine clothes with the knife she kept at her belt to expose his wound. She asked no questions. Still had not. With help from Hux, though she did not know it, she’d fished the bullet out and stitched the surface wound closed. For the next seven days as Hux held shut the puncture in Wren’s lung, she had tended him, putting spoonfuls of broth to his lips and wiping fever-sweat from his brow and cleaning him as he faded in and out of the waking world. She tended him still, perhaps not with the greatest of skill — her cooking at least left much to be desired — but with a gentle smile and a kind touch and soft brown eyes like Wren’s.

 

“You’re doing better today,” she said in her sweet English voice as she held the wooden spoon to his lips. "Think you can hold it yourself?"

 

Wren's fingers twitched, but he made no move, saying nothing. At least Hux had the dubious comfort that his little bird was equally silent for her. The girl nodded, smiling again as she gathered up another mouthful of soup.

 

"Alright then," she said, gentle and kindly and understanding in a way Hux had never, ever been. "Tomorrow, then."

 

Hux watched. From the first spoonful to the last, Hux watched.

 

It was only afterwards that he realized the precise nature of the weight in his chest.

 

 _I can do it myself_.

 

Not anymore.

 

 

( _Author’s note; the age difference between Rey and Kylo is less extreme here, because I planned for them to be their canon ages and then fucking HISTORY happened and there weren’t enough years, so now Kylo is 25 and Rey is still 19. Why did I decide to try to make this historically accurate, there are fucking **magicians**._ )

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

“Up you get, come on,” Ben’s caretaker said, grabbing him under the arms and hoisting him up to recline against the headboard. His wound ached, his back ached, his legs ached from under-use and he grimaced. “Oh, you’re all right. You’re not going to get better if you just lay around and mope. Here.”

 

She put a tin cup of water in his hand and waited, waving him on. With some effort, he raised it to his lips and drank, the trembling of his hand spilling some down his neck and chin. She took a square of roughspun cotton and gently dabbed it away.

 

“There you are,” she said with a smile, as if she was pleased with him. As if she were proud, for something as simple as holding a cup. “A little better every day, that’s the way.”

 

She patted him on the knee and stood, turning to walk away. Without really meaning to, Ben snagged her wrist.

 

For a moment, he was sure she was going to roll her eyes, pull away, leave him alone. Fox would have. Instead she smiled — always smiling, real smiling, none of Fox’s smirking — and sat back down.

 

“Isabelle’s going to give birth any day now,” she said, as if he already knew exactly who Isabelle was. “Last lamb of the season. You’ll be up and about by the sheering, and it’s a good thing, too. This bunch are proper scamps. I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

 

She kept on like that for a while, telling him about Melvin the bully and Kenneth the coward, sweet little Amelia with the black spots on her rump and Harriet wriggling under the fence to play with the kangaroos. They weren’t the largest flock, she said, or the best bred, but they were hers. _Hers_ , as if there could be no greater achievement than owning a handful of sheep.

 

It would have been nice, sitting there, her hand small and warm in his. Would have been, but for the fairy standing in the corner like a ghost, his eyes burning far too bright in the dimness of the house.

 

Ben couldn't look at him. Couldn't think about him. He just wanted to be here, just wanted to be now, just wanted to think about sheep and pretty girls with big brown eyes. That was simple. Nothing about Fox was ever, could ever, be simple.

 

Ben wished, for once, he'd go away.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Wren leaned heavily on the girl as she led him out the plank door to the spindly chair she’d set in the ruddy earth. He didn’t need to, surely — the hole was in his chest, not his long muscular legs — but he did anyway. His breathing came shallow and labored, and he pressed the palm of the four-fingered hand over the bandaged wound. Reaching the chair, he braced himself against it for a moment before sitting down, head tilted back and eyes closed.

 

“I’ll be right back,” the girl said, smiling and patting him on the shoulder. Skipping over to the well, she toed the bucket into place and started pumping.

 

Squinting in the bright hot sun, Wren surveyed the scrubby landscape, strewn with stones and the occasional white-trunked tree. In the vivid color of the world, he looked washed-out in just his trousers, a black and white sketch glued to a painting. Hux sat on the low fence of the sprawling paddock and watched him.

 

Bucket full, the girl lugged it over to the wooden trough on the other side of the fence and carefully poured it in. The two dozen sheep, already gathering at the creak of the hand pump, crowded in, butting heads to get at the mildly dusty water. She went back for another bucket, and a third, sloshing the last of the water over the creature’s fuzzy backs. They bleated happily.

 

“Enjoying the sunshine?” she asked Wren with a cheeky quirk of her lips. He paused for a moment, then shook his head. “Me neither.”

 

He shot her a curious glance. Crouching next to him with her arms on her knees, she looked at him with glittering eyes. “Ask if you want. I know you can talk.”

 

Wren smiled. She sat back on her heels and raised a hand, pointing to the animals greedily guzzling water.

 

“The big one is Francis. The one beside him with the grey on her nose is Charlotte. And there’s Melvin, shoving Eleanor out of the way. Little blighter.”

 

They fell into a companionable silence, the girl watching the sheep and Wren watching the girl and Hux watching them both. It would have been easy to hate her, with her button nose and her high cheekbones and her upturned lips. The comfortable way she sat and the self-conscious way she tucked her hair behind her ear. He certainly hated the way Wren looked at her. He recognized it, had of late felt it on his own face more times than he could count.

 

“Thank you,” Wren said suddenly, his voice harsh and croaky from disuse.

 

The girl didn't pause, smiling slyly and holding out her hand. "You're welcome. I'm Rey."

 

For a moment, Wren’s face fell. He grasped his shoulder, fingers pressing shallow divots into his bare skin. He seemed to consider, though what Hux had no idea. Then, as he had once done to Hux, he grasped her hand.

 

“Ben.”

 

Hux flit away.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

“Hold her down!” Rey shouted, grimacing as the pregnant sheep thrashed and bleated. “The baby’s turned.”

 

Ben pressed down harder, one arm pinning the ewe’s head to the scattered straw of the roughshod barn, the other on her flank, trying to still her enough for Rey to work her fingers inside. Blood covered her hands, her arms, a bright streak across her forehead where she’d wiped away dripping sweat. The lantern flickered, throwing up long shadows over the unchinked walls. Ben knew next to nothing about animals, but he knew this wasn’t going well.

 

“Come on,” Rey urged, grasping the lamb and struggling to pull it free. “Come on, little one, out you—”

 

The lamb slid free all at once, red and slick and half-covered in a slimy sack. Rey pulled the placenta away from its face and wiped afterbirth from its nostrils, murmuring to it quietly. The ewe’s shrieking dropped down to a quiet, tremulous moan and it stilled beneath him.

 

“Is it alright?” Ben asked, struggling not to cough as his breath came hard.

 

“He isn’t breathing,” Rey replied as she patted the lamb gently. “Come on, little one, we didn’t go to all this trouble to lose you now.”

 

For a moment, Ben paused, glancing around. Fox was nowhere to be seen, nor had he been for some days, which up until this point had been a relief. Ben sat up, grimacing at the pull in his chest.

 

“Give him to me.”

 

Rey looked up at him, confused. He held out his arms and without asking, she passed him the lamb’s tiny body. He could feel the life in it, a tiny flickering flame struggling not to go out.

 

“ _Breathe, little one_ ,” he murmured, laying his palm over the tiny chest. “ _Let the lungs be open. Let the throat be clear. Let the child live._ ”

 

He’d never tried to do anything remotely like this, and his heart ached, torn between hoping he succeeded and hoping he failed. He couldn’t look up at her, couldn’t bear to see her eyes. Couldn’t bear to see her _know_.

 

The lamb sucked in a heavy breath and began to squirm. Wriggling out of his arms, it stood on trembling legs, fell, struggled to rise again, bleating all the while. It could have been a coincidence.

 

Both of them knew it wasn’t.

 

 _Mago_ , Ben thought, his hand crawling up his arm to grip his shoulder. _Mago, arder en el infierno._

 

“That was amazing,” Rey breathed.

 

Ben looked up at her. No anger, no fear, no suspicion. Her eyes were wide and bright in the lantern light, her lips parted in a brimming grin. No-one had ever looked at him like that. His heart pattered in his chest.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Somehow, over the past nine years, Hux had forgotten how to be himself. Spending his days as well as his nights in the Faerie Court proved intolerable, and not only because of the open hostility the other fairies showed him when Wren wasn’t there to impress. _They_ would have protected him, _they_ would never have gotten him injured, _they_ would get him to talk and dance and laugh again, if only it were their place and not the failure Hux’s. Yet lurking in the shadows and watching Wren slowly slip away from him and everything they had built was equally unbearable.

 

Sometimes, as he wandered in the never-ending woods beyond the Last Keep, he thought about killing her. Nothing obvious; an infected cut, a cough, a fever. But Wren would blame him, no matter how natural her passing seemed, if only for failing to save her, and he would never forgive him. Then all hope would truly be lost.

 

He returned to the Keep each night, to play his part and watch Wren sit with his eyes closed and pretend he didn’t notice the glares. Night after night after night, day after day after day, until he didn’t. Until the sun went down over the mortal world and Hux felt Wren drift into sleep and he just… didn’t go back. He stayed among the ghosts of trees under a sky full of dead stars and wondered if Wren would even notice.

 

That morning, he watched as Wren woke, invisible. Wren’s deep molasses eyes blinked open, and after a moment, he rolled onto his side to look down at the girl sleeping on a blanket beside the lone bed, as if to make sure she were still there. The corners of his lips pulled into the tiniest of smiles.

 

Hux went back to the woods. And in the woods he stayed.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Slowly, Rey lifted her hand, biting her lip in furious concentration.

 

“Good,” Ben murmured, his palm in the small of her back. “Now say the word.”

 

She took a breath, narrowing her eyes at the wooden spoon. “ _Up_.”

 

The spoon shot into the air, clattered against the roof, then tumbled back down as Rey lost her concentration, almost landing on her head. Clapping her hands over her mouth, she began to giggle, very nearly bouncing with delight, then in a rush threw her arms around his neck, standing on her toes to reach.

 

“I did it!” she gasped as his hands found their way to her hips. “I’m a magician!”

 

“You are,” Ben grinned into the top of her head. She smelled like sheep and soup and dust. “And a talented one. Why did you never get any training?”

 

“I didn’t know,” she said, resting her forehead on his collarbone. “You’re the first magician I’ve ever met.”

 

“Your parents should have noticed,” Ben replied, remembering his childhood tantrums that shattered every piece of glass in the house. “There would have been signs.”

 

“Maybe there were,” she murmured, her fingers playing with the ends of his hair. “They left when I was a child.”

 

He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything at all. He could do that, with her.

 

After a moment, she looked back up at him, threads of hair falling into her face. She smiled. Her smile was perfect, wide with crinkled eyes and too much teeth. It made him think of home; lemonade during the long Virginian summers, sitting curled up with his mother reading fairy stories in the winter, before they sent him away. Autumns and springs. His hand came up and his fingers brushed the threads back, tucking them behind her ear. She blushed and bit her lip.

 

All at once he felt very foolish. Heat rising to his face, he let go of her and backed off, rubbing the back of his neck.

 

“I’m sorry, I—”

 

Slipping a hand into his hair, she pulled him down, rocking up onto her toes to press a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth. Then she shrunk back, bright cherries burning on her cheeks.

 

“Sorry,” she said, looking up at him through her eyebrows and trying to suppress her grin, failing in the most beautiful way. “I haven’t had much practice.”

 

Ben stared at her. His tongue felt thick and heavy in his mouth, his jaw hanging open, his throat working as he struggled to remember words. “I, uh…”

 

“Maybe I didn’t do it right,” Rey wondered, a cheeky glint in her big dark eyes. “Should I try again?”

 

Ben did, however, remember how to nod.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

The first thing Hux saw upon answering the summons, after Wren’s candle-lit face, was the girl lying on the bed. Her back was bare, the thin blanket tucked up just under her shoulder blades. The stink of sweat and sex hung in the room like a fog. Any hope Hux may have entertained upon feeling the call went up in brilliant, sparking flames.

 

“So you finally found someone desperate enough to take your virginity,” he quipped, his throat tight and his voice strange. “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

 

Wren looked over his bare shoulder as if he had somehow managed to forget she was even there. Knowing him, he probably had; once he set a thing down, it vanished from his mind. Hux should have considered himself lucky, that Wren even remembered his name.

 

“Sorry,” Wren whispered, rising from the side of the bed and carrying his candle to the other room. Hux flit into the far corner, hands clasped tight behind his back. Wouldn’t do to ball them into fists. “I didn’t mean… Sorry.”

 

“Get on with it, then,” Hux said, turning his head so the shadows would hide his eyes.

 

Wren didn’t reply, instead quietly taking a seat at the small table — which now had two chairs, Hux noted, where before there had only been one. The second chair was all one piece of wood, undoubtedly grown from a single small splinter. Hux had not yet taught him that particular spell. Mixed in with it all was a sense of stupid, aching pride.

 

“Spit it out, Wren, I don’t have all day,” Hux snapped, swallowing hard. He had not cried in eight hundred years and he would not cry today.

 

“I…” Wren looked down at the tabletop, tracing a whorl in the unfinished wood. “I haven’t seen you. In a while.”

 

“And you were wondering whether I was spying again, is that it?” Hux’s teeth clacked. “Get over yourself, Wren, I have better things to do than watch you and the whore fuck.”

 

He spit the word and Wren flinched, shoulders hunched. Shame, embarrassment, anger. It didn’t matter. He’d done what he’d done.

 

“Why should I care where you choose to shove your pathetic little prick?” Hux continued, his voice getting sharper and louder with every word. “You want to pump the slut full of babies, be my guest! I don’t care! With her taking care of you, maybe I’ll finally get some bloody peace!”

 

As he sucked in a breath his throat closed. He refused to let the tears brimming in his eyes fall, willing them away with a sharp flick of his fingers. Wren sat gripping his shoulder, staring at the ground at Hux’s feet. Hux didn’t dare let another word pass his lips. The next one might be true.

 

After a long stretch of unbearable silence, Wren shifted in his seat. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I just…”

 

“Oh, I understand,” Hux said. It didn’t come off as sarcastic as he intended. It was becoming irritatingly difficult to speak. “She’s so _nice,_ so _pretty_ , like a little flower ripe for the plucking and all yours. Who cares about thrones and crowns and destiny when you can have a _shepherdess_.”

 

And there it was, the truth he had been afraid of. Suddenly he couldn’t stop, words tumbling from his mouth in an increasingly incoherent mess.

 

“Who cares about power when you can have the companionship of your own kind? What does the world matter when you can have one person, who cares about you, who gives you stupid little presents and looks at you like you’re more than just a _thing_ , who makes you realize how _lonely_ you were and you never even knew and now you can’t _unknow_ it, can’t go back to who you were because they made you someone else, they made you _better_ , and—”

 

Again, he choked. Clapped his hand over his mouth, as if he could hold in what had already been spilled. Tears ran hot down his cheeks. In a moment of ludicrous clarity he realized how strange he must look, how pathetic, curling in on himself as he slowly slid down into a crouch. He would have laughed, if he could find the breath between the sobs.

 

Wren rose from his seat. Came over. Hux hid his face, fisting his hands in his hair. If fairies could die of shame — or die at all — he would have.

 

Wren wrapped his arms around him and held him tight. “I’m sorry.”

 

Hux just cried.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Fox sobbed into his shoulder for a long, long time. Ben had no idea what to do. Patting him on the back seemed condescending, and he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make things worse. He just… sat there, holding the fairy in his arms and trying to keep his own breath steady. Both of them breaking down was the last thing they needed.

 

He wanted to just… _explain_. Tell Fox — tell him about the echo in the back of his mind and how Rey made it go away, how she made him feel like someone _else_ and how much he _needed_ that. He couldn’t be Kylo Ren anymore. Kylo Ren had expectations, Kylo Ren had a reputation, a name to live up to and he had _failed_ at that name. He had slaughtered soldiers at their dice and felt like a god, and he had killed rapists and murderers and felt like a monster, and every time he looked at Fox he thought about all the _supposed to_ s. He was _supposed to_ be strong, _supposed to_ be powerful, _supposed to_ do and be all these great things he’d never really wanted in the first place. To Rey, he was amazing just as he was. He didn’t need a crown to be _enough_.

 

He wanted to say, ‘Let’s go back to Lisbon’. Let’s go back to the room above the bakery, to his books, before the war when it was just about learning. When he could spend all day with his nose in a tome and Fox would bring him pilfered buns and badger him until he ate them all, when he went to sleep with Fox perched on his desk or the windowsill or the top of a bookshelf, watching over him. Making him feel safe.

 

But that was selfish. Impossible. The British would hear and he’d be court-marshaled and probably hanged, or end up taking on the entire British army and he just _couldn’t_. It was too much to even think about. And that was selfish, too.

 

Eventually Fox went quiet. Ben still didn’t know what to do. His fingers twitched against Fox’s narrow back. It felt good to hold him, to feel his breath against his skin. For a moment, he wondered what Fox would taste like. _Strawberries,_ he knew, _like his smell_.

 

The fairy stirred. Ben let him go, sitting back on his heels. From around his neck, Fox drew a silver chain thin as a strand of spider silk. From the chain, on a silver ring studded with diamonds, hung Ben’s little finger.

 

Without looking at him, Fox took Ben’s hand and pressed the finger into his palm. Then, without a word, he disappeared.

 

Dawn found Ben still on the floor, staring down at the finger in his hand.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

For two nights, Hux sat in the ghost of a tree and waited. He felt Wren fade into the Faerie Realm and he felt him leave it. Wondered what he was doing, why he waited, whether the others knew or guessed what Hux had done.

 

Then, on the third night, Wren did not fall asleep at his usual time, and Hux knew.

 

He’d lived through the deaths of uncountable bargainers, but never the breaking of a contract. As far as he knew, no fairy had. He had no idea what would happen when Wren’s finger found its home. _Perhaps it will kill me,_ he thought, and was not displeased.

 

It didn’t kill him. It wasn’t even painful. Just a part of him that wasn’t there anymore, an empty hole in his mind where the vague awareness of Wren used to be.

 

He fisted his hands in his hair and screamed.

 


	6. 1817

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now I give you 8900 words of angst and smut. I am a merciful god.

 

**1817**

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Vague threads of moonlight filtered in through the filthy half moon windows to catch upon spider webs and candlesticks and books. On the edge of hearing, things scurried about their business, keeping well away from the magician sitting in the cobwebbed chair. The room smelled of must and dust and old paper, insects rotting into translucence, the rising odor of fresh bread and rolls and pastries. Ben tipped another finger of brandy into the black glass that had once been an inkwell and downed it in one long swallow.

 

On the desk sat a candelabra empty but for a single half-burned candle. With a wave and a mutter, Ben lit it.

 

The fairy who appeared was tall and thin, but his hair was a swoop of burnt gold and his eyes were deep jade instead of blue opals. Ben had bumped into him once, he remembered.

 

“My lord,” the fairy said, dropping into a courtly bow, “I am honored—”

 

“Where’s Fox?” Ben asked. His voice still came strong and clear; he’d had enough practice over the last five years that a few fingers of brandy wouldn’t make him slur.

 

The fairy’s highly arched eyebrows ticked in badly concealed annoyance and he straightened. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

 

_Are all fairies incapable of lying?_ Ben wondered. “Where. Is. Fox.”

 

“I don’t know,” the fairy repeated with a fluttering wave. “Away. He hasn’t been to Court in quite some time. Not since he abandoned you.”

 

A ripple of anger washed through Ben and left him cold. Hard. “How do I summon him?”

 

The fairy bristled, the way Fox used to, but with a disapproving scrunch of his upturned nose. “To summon a specific fairy without a bond, one must know the fairy’s true name.”

 

“Then tell me.”

 

The fairy scowled, looking Ben over as if he was disappointed. Ben supposed he probably was; he didn’t exactly cut an impressive figure these days, with his uncut hair and his unshaven scruff and the clothes he hadn’t bothered to clean. Compared to the fairy’s emerald-studded jerkin and his out-of-place modern leather riding breeches, Ben must have looked like a pauper.

 

“Is that your bargain, then?” the fairy sneered. “The name of the cur who left you?”

 

“No,” Ben replied, slowly rising to his feet. “Tell me his name.”

 

“You think to command me, _sir_?” The fairy’s lip curled, distaste and a hint of wry amusement, like a bully refusing a pleading child. “No-one may command a fairy but the King, and you are _not_ he.”

 

Ben reached out his hand. He’d gotten good at this, over the years. The fairy’s eyes widened, just a bit, his hand coming up to touch his gathered collar as if it were a tad too tight. Then, as Ben slowly curled his fingers, his breath began to falter, rasping rough through his slowly constricting throat. In a matter of moments he was clawing at his own skin, a vein standing out on his forehead as he flushed an ugly scarlet, his thin lips — thin like Fox’s, but with more of a dip in the middle, like a little bow — gradually turning blue.

 

“ _Tell me his name_ ,” Ben commanded, in the tongue of the hills and the trees and the sky.

 

“Hux!” the fairy gasped through a throat near to closed. “His name is Hux!”

 

Ben let him go.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

For the first time in five years, Hux felt the call.

 

The spell was impeccable, practiced, every word a work of art, and woven into it all, his name. His _true_ name.

 

He couldn’t have denied it if he wanted to.

 

He recognized the room immediately, even in the dark and covered in cobwebs and dust. The dribbles of pale candle wax on the bookshelves and the floor and the walls were like old friends, once forgotten and now remembered in aching clarity. So it was with the man sitting behind the desk.

 

The intervening years had not been kind to Wren. Though he had not appreciably aged — magicians, especially good ones, did not tick away the years quite as other men did — he had certainly _changed_. His hair was long enough that even Hux thought it needed cutting, ragged on the ends and greasy at the roots. Bruise-dark circles lurked under his eyes like bats. He hadn’t shaved in at least three days, probably longer; Wren’s scruff had always been slow to grow. There was a half-empty bottle of cheap brandy on the desk, cork undone. Hux could smell the stink.

 

“Wren,” he said, coolly to cover the frantic beating of his heart. “You called me by name. I didn’t think you knew it.”

 

Hux knew he didn’t, or hadn’t; a fairy’s name gave a magician power, and Hux was careful with his. He thought to prompt Wren to preen as he sometimes did, tell him what clever little thing he’d done to suss it out; had he spoken to one of the Old Trees that still remembered the time before Faerie and Earth were split, had he found it in some long-forgotten scroll, had he simply _guessed_.

 

Wren did not take the bait. He simply stared at Hux, a strange look in his eye, as if he had not truly expected to see him again. Perhaps he had not.

 

“Well, then,” Hux continued, squaring his shoulders and folding his hands behind his back. “Get on with it.”

 

Slowly, Wren stood up. He seemed smaller, reduced, his shoulders hunched and his back bent. There was a _lessness_ to him, and a sharpness, as if he had been ground to a keen edge.

 

“I haven’t got all night,” Hux pressed. The silence made him nervous.

 

“Yes, you do,” Wren said in a strange voice deeper than Hux remembered it, changed perhaps with time or the scratch of alcohol. He didn’t slur and his eyes gleamed, but not, Hux thought, with drink. “You say you’re busy, but you never are.”

 

A shiver crawled up Hux’s back. Wren stepped around the desk and old instinct drove Hux to step back, into the shadows beyond the candle light. Wren froze, expression hardened in an indifferent mask but for the clenching muscles in his jaw.

 

“You’re afraid of me.”

 

“Of course not,” Hux blustered, though his heart hammered in his chest. “What do you want?”

 

Wren’s shoulders somehow managed to sag even further. He looked defeated in a way Hux had never seen, not even after Badajoz. Slowly, he turned and went back to his chair.

 

“Never mind.”

 

“Never—” Hux huffed, pride prickling and more afraid than ever. “You went to all the trouble of calling me here, just to say _never mind_?”

 

Wren didn’t reply, sinking back into his old seat. He wore only his shirt and trousers, the black waistcoat and long overcoat that had once served as his uniform nowhere to be seen. As he sat, he fiddled with the little finger Hux had once worn around his neck.

 

“Wren, what on Earth—”

 

“If you don’t want to talk to me,” Wren blurted, gripping the little finger tight as if to pull it back off, “I understand.”

 

Wren had never made such a concession in his life. “Have you completely lost your mind?”

 

“Probably,” Wren said without a trace of a smile.

 

A long strange silence stretched, Wren bowing his head and continuing to fiddle while Hux stared, his breath coming increasingly quickly. Something was very wrong and he did not know what it was, until he realized with an irritating sort of obviousness that Wren was alone.

 

“Where’s the—” he began, stopping as he realized he had no idea what to call her. He wouldn’t grant her the honor of her name, yet _the whore_ seemed unwise. He didn’t want to upset Wren more than he already had.

 

In any case, it didn’t seem to matter. Wren looked him up and down.

 

“You don’t know?”

 

“Why would I?”

 

Considering Hux for a moment, Wren picked up the brandy bottle and poured a thin stream of amber liquid into the little black glass. “She left me.”

 

Hux wasn’t sure what to say. “Oh.”

 

“Remember Badajoz?” Wren asked, as if Hux could possibly forget. “One of the soldiers I didn’t kill got himself transported. We ran into him in Sydney. He told her who I was. What I’d done. She tried to forgive me, but she never looked at me the same.”

 

The speech sounded practiced, as if Wren had rehearsed this moment over and over, trying to find the right words. He put the cup to his lips and drank.

 

“Last time we spoke, she said she was going to summon a fairy. Learn the same way I did. But then you haven’t been to the Fairy Court.”

 

“No,” Hux said evenly, unsure how Wren knew. “I haven’t.”

 

He had no place there, that had been obvious even before he broke his contract. Instead, Hux had found places of his own, ruined Keeps from the days of the glorious empire that had perished when the King left and the summons stopped. Crumbled walls, toppled pillars, the graves of bargainers once loved and now all but forgotten. Hux could wander those lost paradises for months, remembering what had been, dreaming of what could have come to pass, had he not failed.

 

“Is that why you summoned me?” Hux continued. “Looking for gossip?”

 

“No,” Wren said, moving to pour himself another drink. The weight of the word gave Hux pause. He wondered how much Wren had had, whether he was drunk. That would explain some things.

 

“What, then?” Hux asked.

 

“I…” Setting the bottle back down, Wren stared into his glass. “I want to bargain.”

 

“Oh,” Hux said again, comforted and disappointed at once. He had thought, perhaps… But no. That was a thought for the ruins. “Well, that’s simple enough. It will take time, swaying her back to you properly, but—”

 

“Not her,” Wren interrupted, a tint rising to his cheeks. “I don’t… want her.”

 

“Oh,” Hux said for the third time. He was beginning to feel quite the fool. “What, then?”

 

“I want…” Wren trailed off, as if the words were painful for him to say. Taking the glass, he downed it, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Never mind.”

 

“Wren,” Hux ticked, beginning to get annoyed now that the initial rush of the man’s presence was wearing off. “I’ve had enough of these games. Now tell me what you want.”

 

Reaching for the bottle again, Wren made to pour, then stopped. His hand shook. Like they burned him, he put the bottle and glass back down.

 

“ _Wren.”_

Breathing harder, Wren suddenly shot to his feet, stepped around the desk and away into the darkness, the white of his shirt and skin standing out in the dim moonlight.

 

“I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

 

“Can’t _what_?” Hux asked, turning to follow Wren’s hurried path.

 

“Can’t…” Wren made a frustrated noise and ruffled his own hair, gesturing to the bottle on the desk. “I thought it would help. It’s just making me… _Be sober_.”

 

It wasn’t a spell Hux had taught him, nor one he had ever thought to spin himself, but it seemed to work, Wren standing a little straighter and breathing a little slower. Unsure whether to push him further, Hux waited. Eventually Wren took a deep breath, scrubbed his hands over his face and came back into the candlelight.

 

“I want you to—” he began, then stopped again. “I want…”

 

Hux had never seen him have so much difficulty with a thing. It would have been adorable, watching him struggle, if Hux hadn’t begun imagining what request Wren could _possibly_ want that would be so hard to say. Killing the girl, perhaps, or perhaps since his sexual awakening at her hands, he found himself desirous of other, stranger things; Hux had provided for many such appetites over the millenia, conjuring living dolls in the shape of children or neighbors or relatives, to be defiled in whichever way their new owner saw fit. Perhaps he wanted a slave.

 

“I want…” Wren stepped closer, flushed and staring at his feet. Then he met Hux’s gaze. “You.”

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Fox didn’t react. He blinked, a few times, red lashes flickering in the candlelight, but his eyes didn’t widen, his expression didn’t change and he said nothing. Ben cursed himself for his own stupidity and shrunk back.

 

“I’m sorry,” Fox finally said, the blithe tone making Ben flinch. “What was that?”

 

“Never mind,” Ben mumbled, starting to flee back behind the desk to the bottle of brandy that wouldn’t help but would at least give him a legitimate reason to be an idiot.

 

Fox caught his wrist.

 

“In what way?” Fox asked, his tone strange and tense and almost desperate. “What do you mean, you want me? As your servant?”

 

“What?” Ben allowed himself to be pulled back, suddenly unsure and trying very, very hard not to look afraid. “No, of course not.”

 

“Then what do you mean?” Fox asked again, still holding on to Ben’s wrist. “How? How do you want me?”

 

_Naked and moaning my name_ , flashed across Ben’s mind, and for one heart-pounding second he thought he’d said it aloud. “Just… around.”

 

Fox stared at him. “ _Around_.”

 

“Yeah,” Ben said lamely. “Around.”

 

Fox’s breath came strangely, as if he were struggling to keep it slow and calm and not quite succeeding. He still hadn’t let Ben go.

 

“As a…” Fox said, stopping and starting again. “As a companion. A friend, I mean. As a friend.”

 

_No_ , Ben thought, saying, “If you don’t want to—”

 

“No, I—” Swallowing, Fox shifted from one foot to the other. His grip on Ben’s hand slid down to curl around his fingers. “No-one’s ever asked for such a thing.”

 

Ben had no idea what to say, so he didn’t say anything at all.

 

For a long, awkward while they stood, silent and staring not quite at each other, Ben’s hand still in Fox’s. Ben thought about asking him to let go, but… After so long, it was good to touch him again. Closing his eyes, Ben realized they’d somehow drifted close enough for him to catch Fox’s strawberry smell. It wasn’t quite like he remembered; wilder, mixed with something like warm fur and rain. Ben wondered if it had changed.

 

“I—” Fox suddenly said, Ben’s eyes flashing open. “I’m sorry. I can’t do that again.”

 

A slow crushing cannonball landed in Ben’s chest. He’d been afraid, so afraid, and now here he was, exactly where he’d thought he’d be.

 

“It’s not that I don’t—” Fox continued in a rush, interrupting himself. “I just— You broke my heart. Do you know how hard it is to break a fairy’s heart? I don’t think it’s ever been done.”

 

He said it half-jokingly, but Ben didn’t laugh. He’d known, of course he’d known. He’d known even before Fox gave him the finger that it was over. He’d chosen the fairy tale instead of the fairy, pretending he could be the man Rey thought he was, but even before Sydney he’d been cracking. Ultimately herding sheep was no better than doing laundry. But he’d always had hope, always thought in the back of his mind, _I’ll summon him again and everything will be like it was_. That thought had kept him on his feet for five long years. Now…

 

Now he didn’t know what he was going to do.

 

He should have said something. ‘ _I’m sorry’,_ or ‘ _I understand’_. Something to acknowledge what Fox had said. Even just a nod.

 

He couldn’t do it. The cannonball was too heavy. He should have just said _‘Never mind’_ again, over and over until Fox left him alone, never should have summoned him in the first place because now the idea of going to sleep and dreaming his ugly dreams and waking up knowing for an absolute fact that he was and always would be alone made his chest constrict. Five years, he’d been slogging on, five years without Fox over his bed protecting him as he slept, five years without the Faerie Court to take away the nightmares, five years and they had almost killed him. Now he stood before a vast gulf of time, twenty years, thirty, a hundred, however long he lived, all like these last. He would have to wake up, day after day after day, knowing there was no hope. Knowing he would never get out of it. Knowing he’d had the world in the palm of his hand and thrown it all away for a girl he’d only liked because she thought he was _good_.

 

He couldn’t do it.

 

“Wren?” Fox asked, tilting his head to the side and furrowing his brow.

 

Ben realized he was crying.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Hux hadn’t the slightest idea what to do.

 

Wren was _crying_ and Wren _never_ cried and Hux usually mocked this sort of behavior, especially when he was the cause of it, but he couldn’t mock _this_. Couldn’t do anything but stand there and awkwardly hold Wren’s hand. He wanted to pull Wren into his arms, but Wren was already turning away, taking his hand back to swipe at his tears as he stalked off.

 

“Wren!” Hux called after him, uncertainly bouncing on his toes before deciding to follow him into the shadows. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I—”

 

He didn’t realize he’d mimicked what Wren had once said to him until the man turned, his wet eyes flashing in the candlelight.

 

“I can’t do it,” he said, his voice thick and strange.

 

“Can’t do what?” Hux asked.

 

“I can’t close my eyes,” Wren choked, “and be buried alive and be torn apart and feel you inside me and wake up alone. I can’t live the _rest of my life_ knowing this is how it’s going to be. I can’t do it, I would rather die, just, just _kill_ me. You want a bargain, there it is. Just fucking—”

 

Grabbing Hux’s wrists, Wren brought his hands to his throat, trying to get him to latch on. Hux yanked away hard enough that Wren stumbled, fell to his knees. He didn’t rise again.

 

A thousand responses flashed through Hux’s mind. ‘ _What the fuck is wrong with you’_ and _‘I’m not going to bloody kill you’_ and _‘Please stop, you’re scaring me_ ’. His mouth moved but nothing came out. Gradually, like a statue crumbling after centuries of wear, Wren curled in on himself, hand gripping his shoulder so tightly his knuckles gleamed white even in the darkness. His shoulders shook.

 

When their positions had been reversed, Wren had dropped to his knees beside him, wrapped him in his arms, held him until the hurt had died down into a dull throbbing ache, like a broken bone after the initial shock. Hux didn’t know how. He didn’t want Wren grabbing his hands again. He stood, awkwardly, knelt, awkwardly, put his hand between Wren’s shoulder blades, awkwardly. Wren made a noise, a tiny broken noise, and Hux didn’t know what to do.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said, like Wren had said, appreciating his position in an entirely new way. “Please stop crying.”

 

Wren did not follow his advice. His shoulders shook harder and he made more noises, like Hux’s hands really were around his throat choking him to death. If his hands hadn’t been clearly visible Hux would have thought he was trying to do it himself. Leaning down, Hux tried to wrap his arms around him, more like he was holding a barrel than a man.

 

“Please stop crying,” he said again, his chin resting on Wren’s shoulder blade. “I don’t know what to do.”

 

Gently, Wren began to rock.

 

Hux had driven men to suicide before. Never by accident. He got bored of them, started needling them at every turn, popping up on the periphery of their vision whenever they were out and about, making sure everyone thought they were mad and stayed well clear, isolating them until him and his cruel whispers were the only things in their world. He knew that direction very well. The other way, not so much. He’d always thought it was a sign of weakness; anyone who crumpled easily enough to take their own life wasn’t worth saving.

 

Wren _was_. There was no question on Hux’s mind. He knew he would outlive the man, he was ready for that, but not _now_. Not like _this._

 

“Alright,” he said, heart pounding. “Alright, you can have me, however you want, just please, _stop crying._ ”

 

He half expected a sudden turn, ‘The bargain is struck’ and Wren’s hand in his before he could change his mind. Instead, Wren just kept crying, getting _worse_ , his breath hitching into little sobs.

 

“You can have me,” Hux repeated, softer. “You can have me.”

 

Wren took a deep shuddering breath and moaned, hand unclamping from his shoulder to latch onto Hux’s arm and pull him tight against his back. Hux, his own breath beginning to shake, pressed a kiss to the back of Wren’s head.

 

They rocked together for a while, Hux’s grip slowly relaxing until he draped over Wren like a cape. Slowly, Wren began to calm. Tears prickled at Hux’s eyes, blinked into the linen of Wren’s shirt. It had been so long, so very long. Five years was nothing to a fairy and still, it had been _so long_.

 

Slithering in his arms, Wren somehow managed to twist around to face him, legs straddling Hux’s lap and arms around his neck. Wren looked down and Hux looked up, breathing slow and deep despite the clattering tarantella of his heart. The wet streaks down Wren’s cheeks gleamed in the distant candlelight.

 

“You can have me,” Hux said once more, almost into Wren’s full, soft lips.

 

Wren kissed him.

 

Hux had imagined many first kisses, examining the cracked black stone of what had once been a dance floor or the shattered white crystal of a light. Hard ones, soft ones, laughing ones, bloody ones. Never a teary one. Wren tasted of salt, the lingering sourness of brandy, a quintessential _humanness_ that was like warm, wet meat. One hand on Wren’s shoulder blades, the other in the small of Wren’s back, Hux let his eyelids droop.

 

“Make me yours,” Wren murmured into Hux’s mouth, the words thrumming between them. “I want to be yours.”

 

“Are you sure?” Hux breathed back.

 

Wren did not reply in words, but ran his hand down Hux’s arm to the hand in the small of his back, drawing it away and pressing their palms together, weaving their fingers tight. Hux nuzzled into the warmth of Wren’s throat, eyes closed, trying to believe that he was truly _here_ , that he was _now_ , that this was _real._

 

“You are,” he said, squeezing Wren’s hand. “You are mine. For this night, and all the nights to come.”

 

“And the days,” Wren muttered into Hux’s hair.

 

Hux smiled. “And the days. For all the time that there is, you are mine, and I am yours.”

 

“Forever.”

 

Hux breathed him in, the animal smell of a mortal thing. His heart ached, but he did not linger on the thought. He would not say the word, would not promise what he could not give, but held Wren’s hand tight and said, “The bargain is struck.”

 

Just like that, all of Hux’s broken pieces found their place.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Strange, how missing a part of him could make him feel whole. Ben untangled his hand from Fox’s, just to make sure, just to _see_ with his own eyes that the finger was gone. For the first time in five years his hand looked right. New tears burned in his eyes and he crushed Fox against his chest, trying to find the words to thank him and finding there were none, not for this. All he could do was hold him and cry into his soft red hair.

 

Fox pressed soft kisses into his throat, hands slowly roaming over Ben’s back as if he couldn’t hold him close enough. He smelled so good, and it _was_ changed, Ben was sure of it. Slowly, as Ben looked past Fox’s shoulder to the gap in his hand, it began to sink in; they were _here_. It was _done_. A weight lifted off his shoulders, the cannonball rolled away, the deep dark pit of the future was paved over in strawberries and gold. He wanted to laugh, wanted to sob, settled for a little bit of both, ragged huffs of pure joyful relief into Fox’s hair. It shouldn’t still be night. The sun should have come up. Didn’t it know things were _right_ again?

 

Eventually, the thrilling tremble of joy faded and he was left with a deep exhaustion, aware again of the puffy ache of his eyes, the tension in his ribs from his desperate efforts to hold back his sobs. Like a melting candle, he slumped against Fox, letting the fairy support him as tension bled out through his arms and his eyes and everywhere the two of them touched. Fox smoothed a hand along his hair, fingers trailing through it and playing with the ends.

 

“You need a haircut,” Fox said, the sudden strangeness of it making Ben huff a laugh into his shoulder. “And a shave.”

 

Ben didn’t reply, but smiled, nuzzling against Fox’s throat and realizing only after that the scruff of his beard was scratching Fox’s pale skin, flushing it a rosy molten gold. He kissed the spot, tasted strawberries, just as he’d always known he would. After a moment’s hesitation, he let his tongue flick over Fox’s pulse.

 

Fox hummed, tilted his head, exposing more neck. Ben kissed his way up to the corner of Fox’s jaw, slow and still uncertain even after everything — perhaps Fox didn’t really _mean_ , hadn’t considered…

 

But no. When Ben pulled the lobe of Fox’s ear between his lips, the fairy sighed, tangling his fingers in Ben’s hair and sweeping his other hand down to play with the waistband of Ben’s trousers.

 

“I suppose I could get used to it,” Fox purred, though whether he meant the scratch of Ben’s beard or the kisses or _any_ of this, Ben didn’t know.

 

“Do you want to?” Ben murmured into the skin just below Fox’s ear.

 

Fox’s fingers plucked at Ben’s waistband. “Hm?”

 

“Do you want to…” Ben found himself unable to say it. Instead he slipped his hand down between them to tug at Fox’s ornate belt.

 

“Do I want to shag?” Fox said with a smile, slipping his fingers under the waistband and curling them so his long fingernails pulled at Ben’s shirt. Ben thought about what they would feel like on his bare skin and shuddered. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

 

Feeling himself flush, Ben nodded. His heart raced so fast he was sure it would burst from his chest. Had he been this nervous with Rey? He couldn’t remember, but he didn’t think so — Rey was so _easy_. Fox had always been hard.

 

“I don’t know,” Fox hummed, grinning wickedly as his fingers slid deeper and deeper into Ben’s trousers. “Do you?”

 

Ben nodded. He wasn’t sure where he was going to scrounge up the energy, but he was damn sure going to try.

 

“Well, then…” Fox’s voice was low and soft and dark, and it made Ben’s breath come fast. “I suppose I could be… persuaded.”

 

Taking his hand from Ben’s trousers and pushing him back, Fox wriggled out from underneath him and stood, backing away into the room. Ben, still on his knees, stared up at him in quirk-browed confusion.

 

“I have a _plan_ ,” Fox said with a twisting smile, turning to trail his fingers over the bookshelf. Like scattered seeds floating in the air, little lights appeared, barely brighter than a firefly yet strung together in glittering streams providing a warm, wild sort of light; stars called down to drip from Fox’s fingertips.

 

“A plan?” Ben asked as Fox began to slowly circle, leaving a trail behind him. With great effort, he rose to his feet.

 

“Oh, yes. I have given this moment a _great_ deal of consideration.”

 

An image flashed into Ben’s mind; Fox, his creamy skin bare to the world, writhing on white silk sheets as he teased the leaking cock jutting proudly from his thatch of red hair. Face burning, Ben dug his fingers into his arm.

 

Fox noticed, pausing in his circle. “If you’re not comfortable—”

 

“I am,” Ben hurried. “I just — I’m fine.”

 

Fox came towards him, fairy lights gleaming in his hair. He put his hands on Ben’s hips, gently, as if they were dancing.

 

“I won’t have you ‘ _never mind_ ’-ing me, little bird,” he said softly. “If you have doubts, voice them.”

 

“I don’t,” Ben replied, and seeing Fox’s lips drawn into an annoyed line, continued, “I really don’t. I thought about… you. Doing things. To yourself.”

 

Fox’s annoyance broke into a sharp grin. “Did you, now?”

 

“Yes,” Ben mumbled as Fox lent in for a kiss.

 

This one was longer, deeper, _better_ in a million ways and not the least of which being that it didn’t taste like tears. With Rey they had always been two fools bumbling along together, but Fox took skill and transformed it into _art_. His darting tongue, the changing pressure of his lips, nipping teeth, all combined to render Ben flushed and panting without his hands ever leaving Ben’s hips.

 

“I may deign to let you see such a thing,” Fox purred. “But only if you are very, very good. Take off your clothes.”

 

Having so commanded him, Fox sauntered away to continue the ring of lights. For a moment, Ben just stood. Then his hands flew to his buttons.

 

Fox watched him with great interest, approaching once the circle was done and the room was filled with light. He watched the way Ben bumbled with his ivory buttons like it was the most fascinating thing in the world, swooped around to watch from a different angle as Ben shrugged the shirt off, either unaware of the stumbling effect his observation had on Ben or uncaring.

 

“You do it differently when you know you’re being watched,” Fox said, confirming it to be the latter. Ben felt his flush spread into his ears.

 

“You watched me undress?”

 

“Oh, I watched you do _everything_ ,” Fox said with a cruel smirk, then faltered. “You’re not… Angry with me, are you?”

 

Part of Ben knew he should be. But then what he _should_ feel and what he _did_ feel had never really aligned, and really, he had _known_. Perhaps not the extent of it, but he had _known_. He thought about Fox watching him bathe, watching him sleep, watching him slip his hand between his legs and bite his own knuckle to keep from waking the soldiers as he came, and breathed considerably harder.

 

“No.”

 

Fox’s grin returned, and he began to circle again, waving at Ben to continue.

 

Ben found he _was_ doing things differently. Normally he tugged his undershirt forward over his head, but now he found himself trying to pull it straight up, as if his hair could get any more mussed. He didn’t quite succeed, struggling somewhat as his elbows caught in the torso of the tight-fitting undershirt, a shiver coursing up his spine as Fox knelt to examine the revealed slice of his abdomen. Fox’s breath ghosted on his trembling stomach and he gulped.

 

When the undershirt had also fallen to the dusty floor, Ben dropped his shaking hands to his trouser buttons. Fox’s fingers lighted upon his wrist.

 

“Boots,” Fox reminded him with a smirk.

 

While he should have used a boot jack, Ben made do with the toe of his other foot, stumbling more than a little as he yanked his first foot free. Fox caught him, laying his hands on Ben’s shoulders to help steady him as he freed the second. The touch of his bare skin to Ben’s was electric. Ben felt a fool, more a trembling virgin than when Rey had first taken him to bed. The gently condescending amusement on Fox’s face didn’t help.

 

“There you are,” Fox said when his boots were kicked away and he stood on the worn boards in his stocking feet. The fairy trailed the backs of his nails down Ben’s arms, sending more shivers coursing through him. “ _Now_ , your trousers. That’s a good little bird.”

 

Ben tried to glare at him and didn’t quite succeed. The buttons on his trousers were larger than the ones on his shirt, but they proved more troublesome, more so the more impatient he became. Fox stepped closer, trailing his nails over Ben’s skin just above the line of his waistband. They felt even better than Ben had imagined.

 

“Do you need help, little bird?” Fox asked in a gentle sing-song. Without waiting for a reply — which Ben felt largely incapable of giving — he ran his finger down the front of Ben’s trousers, buttons undoing themselves as he went. A push, and Ben’s trousers fell to puddle around his ankles. As Ben struggled to breathe, Fox played with the waistband of his drawers. “And what about these? Do you need help with these?”

 

Nodding, Ben wrapped his hand around the back of Fox’s neck and pulled him into a kiss. Fox undid these buttons by hand, every tug and pull transmitting through the well-fit fabric to Ben’s already throbbing cock. Fox bit his lip, thrust his tongue into his mouth, gave a gentle yank that sent Ben’s drawers slithering down his hips and left him naked but for his stockings and garters.

 

Ben expected him to look right away, burn every inch of him with his sparking blue opal eyes, but he didn’t. He seemed more interested in Ben’s face, pulling back barely a hand’s breadth to examine his heavy-lidded eyes, his parted lips, his burning cheeks. If Ben had needed any confirmation that Fox had seen him naked, this was it.

 

“This is going,” the fairy murmured, leaning back in to breathe the words into the corner of Ben’s jaw, “ _exactly_ how I imagined.”

 

The low rumble of his voice sent yet another course of shivers running up Ben’s spine. He brought a hesitant hand up to the long row of tiny pearl buttons closing Fox’s ruby jerkin.

 

“Do you want me to…”

 

“You’ve had enough trouble with buttons,” Fox said with a gleam in his eye, brushing Ben’s hand away. “And you’re not finished.”

 

Fox stepped back again, circled around to stand behind him in long, slow steps. Ben knew immediately what he intended, yet though he was already naked, bending over to undo his garters felt too obscene. He knelt instead, prompting Fox to let out a disappointed groan.

 

“Now look at what you’ve done,” he said. “You’ve gone and ruined it. Put it all back on, start over. Chop chop.”

 

Ben tried to fight back a grin and failed, shaking a stubborn stocking off as he stood. Fox came up behind him, wrapped his arms around his waist, hummed into Ben’s neck.

 

“I love all your little dots,” Fox murmured, his fingers dancing from mole to mole across Ben’s stomach and leaving tremors in their wake. “Like little black stars on a white sky.”

 

Ben had always thought they were ugly, insisted Rey blow out the candle so she couldn’t see. It hadn’t even occurred to him with Fox; why would he hide, when Fox had seen him a thousand times?

 

“I love your…” Ben began to reply in kind, then found himself floundering; _your hair, your nails, your eyes, the gold on your cheeks, the way you smile, like you only ever do it with me_. “I love you.”

 

He hadn’t quite meant to say it. Was surprised, at how easy it was. He’d said it to Rey, in the beginning when he was still trying with all his might to be perfect for her, but it had always felt like dragging a rusty file through his throat. He expected Fox to freeze, stiffen, surprised. Fox’s breath did pause for a moment. Then he pressed his lips to Ben’s ear.

 

“You’d better. If you break my heart again, I’ll kill you.”

 

There wasn’t a trace of a joke in it. Ben’s heart beat faster, his stomach flipping under Fox’s claw-like hands.

 

Fox turned him, kissed him, deep and claiming as if every inch of Ben belonged to him. It did, Ben remembered with a thrill, wrapping his arms around the fairy’s narrow waist. By the laws of fairy magic, he belonged to Fox, to do with as he pleased. The thought had made him happy before and it made him _want_ now, want to be pushed down and _used_ in whichever way the fairy’s well-schooled mind saw fit. Would Fox fuck him, he wondered, nipping at Fox’s thin bottom lip, lay him down on his stomach on the floor and fill him till he screamed, or would Fox want to ride him, hold him down and keep him from cumming until Fox had already spilled glittering white gold across his chest? He tugged at the jerkin again, put his hand in the small of Fox’s back, pulled him forward to press against Ben’s hard prick.

 

Fox huffed a laugh, biting him and tugging at the flesh of his lip before drawing back. “Eager, are we?”

 

“I want you,” Ben rumbled, sliding his hand down over the firm curve of Fox’s ass. “ _Now_.”

 

“No,” Fox said blithely and stepped away. “On the bed.”

 

At first, Ben just stood and stared. Fox’s cheeks were flushed a rosy gold, but if he was as aroused as Ben, the black-and-gold codpiece he wore didn’t show it. For a mad moment Ben thought about ripping it off with his teeth. Then he turned and stalked over to the bed tucked between two bookcases.

 

It hadn’t been slept in in many years, the locals too spooked by the notion of fairy curses and mad magicians returning from war to rent the room out again, and when Ben flopped down into it a cloud of dust billowed out around him. Fox, following not far behind him, waved his hand and the dust glittered away. There wasn’t enough room to properly spread his legs, a wall on one side and the edge of the bed too close on the other, and Ben didn’t quite have the courage besides. He drew up his knees, only laying back by virtue of the tiredness that still clung to his bones. Fox, as if it were a broad shelf, hopped up to crouch on the wrought iron footboard, leaning back against the bookshelf and looking down with a smile.

 

“Is that how you think I want you?” Fox asked. “Folded up like a handkerchief?”

 

“There’s no room,” Ben protested, knowing even before he said it the excuse wouldn’t do. Fox rolled his eyes dramatically.

 

“You’re an occasionally intelligent man. I’m sure you can come up with _something_.”

 

_Nothing he hasn’t seen_ , Ben reminded himself. It didn’t help. Pressing one leg up against the wall, he edged his toes as far across the bed as he could go. His knees were spread perhaps a hands breadth, and he knew it wasn’t enough even before Fox waved for him to continue. Swallowing and gripping at the dusty sheets, he let his foot slip off the edge of the bed.

 

For the first time, Fox’s eyes raked over him from head to toe, lingering on the cock laying hard and red against his stomach. Slowly, as if he knew exactly the effect it would have, he licked his lips.

 

“Fox,” Ben groused, his voice rough. “Come on.”

 

Fox grinned a wicked grin. “Touch yourself.”

 

Some part of Ben had known it was coming. His heart still leapt into his throat and his cock twitched. He didn’t bother to argue. He didn’t _want_ to argue.

 

His fingertips started on his stomach, trailing hesitantly down as if Fox would say, ‘ _No, wait, stop’._ He didn’t. His eyes followed Ben’s hand with a strange expression, somewhere between open hunger and pure fascination. Ben wondered how many times Fox had watched him do this, how many times he had imagined this very moment. Again, the image of Fox teasing himself flashed through Ben’s mind. He swallowed and wrapped his hand around his shaft, shuddering.

 

There was no mechanical reason why stroking himself now would feel better than doing the exact same motion alone. It did. His legs splayed a little wider, his hips canted up, he went slower than he ever would have alone, throwing in little touches he never would have bothered with, like pulling his foreskin back to expose his head or swiping his thumb over the slit. After a few dry strokes, he brought his hand up to lick his palm, watching sparks gleam in Fox’s eyes.

 

“Are you just going to— sit there?” Ben asked, clearing his throat to try to shake some of the husk from his voice. It didn’t work.

 

“For the present,” Fox replied. His voice was husky too. “Faster.”

 

Ben obeyed. An orgasm was already building in his belly. He shifted his hips again, rocking up against his hand. His other hand came up to grasp a spindle of the headboard, the twisted metal biting into his palm and buying him a little more time. Fox was staring at him, open hunger taking over, and Ben closed his eyes, trying to think about anything else, spells, battle, anything.

 

“Fox,” he gasped, his strokes stuttering, back arching up off the bed. “Fox—”

 

_“Stop_.”

 

The barked command might has well have been a spell. Ben’s hand flew up to the headboard, striking his knuckles before he got his fingers clenched around a bar.

 

“ _Fuck,”_ he cursed, pain and dying pleasure and a glorious frustration he hated and adored. His hips jerked up, trying to find more friction, pre-cum dripping down his prick. “Jesus—”

 

Fox’s hand flew out to smack his knee. Ben yelped and jumped, cursing again, his heart thundering so fast he felt dizzy.

 

“I’ve told you not to use that name,” Fox scolded, only half playful. Ben sagged in a shuddery boneless heap and moaned.

 

After a moment, Fox hopped to his feet, rocking forward to step down onto the bed. Before his feet hit the mattress, he _shimmered_ , and suddenly there was no red jerkin, no slashed shirt, no hose or shoes or codpiece. He stood over Ben, naked and smirking and fucking _glorious_ , with gold dusting his shoulders like freckles and unexpected curls of red hair on his chest and around his hard cock, exactly how Ben had imagined, head flushed the same shimmering rose gold as his cheeks. The finger hung on its spider-silk thin chain around his neck and Ben’s heart pounded _his, his, his_.

 

“There are rules,” Fox said, fiddling with the finger. “No moving unless I tell you. No cumming unless I tell you. You can make all the wonderful needy noises you like, but when I ask you a question you’ll say ‘yes Fox’ or ‘no Fox’. Do you understand?”

 

Ben had never nodded so hard in his life. Fox slipped down onto his knees, positioned a little awkwardly on either side of Ben’s hips.

 

“If it’s too much,” Fox continued in a softer voice, “if you can’t take it or you want to stop, you’ll tell me. No ‘never mind’-ing. Agreed?”

 

Slower, Ben nodded again. He didn’t know what Fox had in store for him, but he wasn’t afraid. Fox softly trailed his nails down Ben’s chest, then pinched his nipple, hard enough to make Ben gasp.

 

“What did I just say?”

 

“Yes Fox,” Ben groaned, gripping the iron bars tight. “ _Fuck_.”

 

Fox smiled and lent down to kiss him.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

With a few sweeps of his tongue, Hux had Wren moaning into his mouth, already struggling with the ‘no moving’ rule. Muscles bulged in his strong arms and his hips curled, shapely ass not quite lifting off the bed. Hux rewarded him with a nip to his already bruised lip and a hand sliding down his stomach to wrap around the base of his cock. Wren cursed — not irritating blasphemies, although Hux was sure those would come later, when he couldn’t think to censor them — and he threw his head back.

 

Having Wren laid out beneath him like a midsummer feast and not devouring him immediately was the most difficult thing Hux had ever done. His teeth scraped over the sweetness of Wren’s bared throat and he felt Wren’s groans rumble under his tongue, squeezing in slow cycles as Wren’s cock pulsed and throbbed in his hand, and he bit only softly, teased but did not stroke, kept his body arched over Wren’s so his lips and his hand were the only places the two of them touched. He wanted to lay over him like a blanket, feel the gleam of Wren’s sweat on his skin, take Wren inside him and watch the infuriating, beautiful man fall apart. Yet he had _plans_ , and he refused to let this moment be anything but spectacular.

 

“Poor little bird,” he murmured into the hollow of Wren’s throat as the man’s moaning began to devolve into tense, aching whines. “You want to move, don’t you?”

 

He didn’t have to look up to know Wren was nodding. Trailing kisses down Wren’s chest, Hux rolled up into a kneel, slowly drawing his hand along Wren’s cock until his glistening head disappeared into his palm.

 

“Just your hips, now—”

 

The force of Wren’s first thrust slammed his thighs against Hux’s, jarring him and making his cheeks burn with the thought of that thick cock driving into his ass instead of his hand. Wren fucked into his grip with a burning desperation he hadn’t expected this early on, though perhaps he should have — he had watched Wren masturbate enough times to know the man did not practice delayed gratification. Hux found himself wondering what kind of a lover he would have been to the whore; had he held back enough to satisfy her, used his pretty mouth, taken what he desired and flopped over into a dozing heap? The second, he thought, angry and aroused at once.

 

“It isn’t that you fucked her, you know,” he said, loosening his grip little by little so all Wren’s bucking could only bring him the barest of satisfaction. “I would have enjoyed seeing that. It wasn’t even that you loved her, though I am a jealous creature. You set me aside. Like an old toy.”

 

Wren’s hips stuttered, paused, before his animal nature overwhelmed his guilt. He said nothing — Hux had not expected him to, not floundering on the edge of orgasm — but brought his elbows together over his flushed face, breath coming hard and strained.

 

“The worst of it was, I couldn’t even blame you,” Hux continued, the fingertips of his unoccupied hand trailing up Wren’s chest to ghost over the small circular scar, faded now from brilliant red to the bleached white of new skin. “I failed you. She did not. I _deserved_ to be discarded. Stop.”

 

It took Wren a moment, either to understand, or to obey, and even then it was only with great difficulty. Sweat shone on his skin, his flush spread across his shoulders, every muscle in his body straining and twitching. Hux released his cock and slid his hands up Wren’s stomach, his sides, feeling all the little tremors rippling beneath, leaving red lines as he raked his nails back down. Wren gulped and slowly relaxed, arms falling back open as Hux smoothed his hands over them. His molasses eyes were blown black with need, heavy lidded, expression troubled. Shifting up his body, Hux leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to his parted lips.

 

“I didn’t…” Wren mumbled, voice rough as broken stone. “That wasn’t… why.”

 

“Wasn’t it?” Hux asked, sliding one hand up Wren’s neck to cup his face. “You stopped talking to me long before you ever fell in love with her.”

 

“I—” Wren swallowed, shifted, breathing deep as if to gather the words before he said them. “I didn’t want her to know. What I was.”

 

Hux considered him. Perhaps he was telling the truth. Perhaps he wasn’t. “It doesn’t matter. You’re mine now, and I am never letting anyone hurt you ever again.”

 

A human would have required preparation, oil, a long messy thrusting of fingers Hux had neither the time nor the patience for. He reached behind himself, sliding Wren’s prick between the cheeks of his ass and into his hole. For a moment, as he sat up to take Wren inside him as deep as Wren could go, there was nothing but the glorious slick stretch, splitting him open and sending shivers of long-anticipated pleasure coursing through his veins. Then with a sigh he came back to Wren’s gasped curses, his trembling arms, the shake of his thighs as he struggled to stay still.

 

“Fuck, God,” Wren groaned, eyes shut tight against a wave of pleasure Hux could see boiling under his skin. “Fox, Jesus, please…”

 

Hux did not correct him. His jealous heart pounded hard in his chest, hating the sound of another name on Wren’s lips, but he let it lie. Jesus did not have Wren’s finger around his neck.

 

“If anyone tries,” Hux said, voice gone breathy as he rolled his hips, “I will destroy them, utterly. I will boil their brains inside their skulls, I will burn their children, I will— Wren, _move_ , I want—”

 

Wren’s hands flew to his hips so quickly they hurt, grabbing him, rolling them, off the narrow bed and onto the dusty floor. Hux’s back hit hard and he gasped, gasped again as Wren grabbed his legs and pulled them up to hook around behind his waist. Pressing a flurry of built up kisses to Hux’s throat, Wren drove in, rough and fast and desperate, and it felt every bit as good as Hux had imagined it would, animal, human heat pounding deep inside him until he moaned as deeply as Wren. Whatever words he intended to say died in his throat, their corpses emerging as throaty groans and a shuddering keen that would have embarrassed him had he not heard the exact same sound wrenched from Wren’s lips. Wren kissed him, kissed and kissed and kissed, his orgasm building again in the tension between his shoulders, the stuttering of his thrusts, the throbbing of his cock deep inside.

 

“Come for me,” Hux managed to breathe, tightening as his own release built deep inside. “Come for me, Wren—”

 

Wren’s teeth sunk deep into his shoulder and heat flooded inside him and Hux got his wish.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Ben fell asleep with Fox’s seed spilled like liquid pearl over his stomach, the fairy curled in his arm flushed a gentle rose gold from the roots of his scalp all the way down to his long pale toes. There was a darker circle bruised into the skin where Ben had bit him. He seemed to glow, a soft shine in the dark of the room, the fairy lights gone out and the candle long extinguished and the quiet hours after the setting moon cast upon the world beyond the dirty windows. For the first time in five years, Ben did not dread closing his eyes.

 

He opened them again to a wood, towering birch trees like pale blue shadows reaching up into a black sky swirled with more stars than Ben had ever seen. His mouth dropped open and he turned, amazed to find a crumbling tower of eroded black stone still so high it seemed to claw at the cosmos above, an outstretched hand reaching to touch the face of God, if he existed in this ghostly place. Before it stood Fox in his glittering white, a star sapphire at his throat and a smile playing at his thin lips. Ben’s heart lurched with joy.

 

“Welcome to Starkiller Keep,” Fox said, his voice easy and happy and prideful.

 

Ben stepped closer, dizzy from the sheer height of it. It was like standing in the shadow of a mountain. “I’ve never seen it from the outside.”

 

“You haven’t seen it from the inside, either,” Fox replied, turning to look up at the tower with him. “No-one has. Not in three hundred years. After the King left and the summons stopped, it was abandoned, like the rest of them. I always intended to come back, once I had bargainers again. The only thing a fairy hates more than the company of their own kind is loneliness.”

 

Ben looked at him. He thought about five years. He thought about three hundred. He thought about the first time they’d met, how Fox had looked at him, like he’d never seen anything so interesting. He thought about taking his hand, and pulled him into a kiss instead.

 

He didn’t say it, but he hoped Fox would understand.

 

_You’ll never be lonely again._

 


	7. Epilogue: Empire

 

**Epilogue: Empire**

 

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Arthur sat in his favorite upholstered chair, reading a hundred-year-old treatise on earth magic. He had purchased it at great expense, borrowing money from the Order’s official stipend, only to find it as useless as every other book and scroll and scrap of scribbled paper he’d bought in the last eight years. Nowhere was there mention of wandering hills or how to stop them. What the boy had done was beyond the ken of mortal magic.

 

Huffing loudly through his nose, he closed the folio and stood to find a place for it on one of his many bookshelves. Filing it away, he turned, only to find a red-haired man sitting in his chair.

 

“Who the hell—” he began, only to find his voice produced no sound, the moving of his lips accompanied only by silence.

 

“You’re a lucky man, Simon James Maybrook,” the red-haired man said, rattling off the name Arthur hadn’t used since he was a boy as if he had every right to say it. “I wanted to kill you the moment we stepped through your windows, but Ren insisted on having words. Aren’t you grateful?”

 

Hearing the wretch’s name, Arthur glanced around and saw him leaning up against the bank of windows, tall and black and arrogant as ever as the rainy English night pattering on behind him. He hadn’t changed in seven years, still dressed up in modern finery as if the name _magician_ meant nothing. And if there was Ren, then the creature in Arthur’s armchair must be…

 

He crossed himself and the monster huffed a laugh, as if his piety amused him. He was an awful thing, cheeks tinted a horrible metallic yellow and blue eyes glowing like the fires of hell. His dress was even worse than Ren’s, glittering with rubies and onyx and diamond as if he were some great lord and not a horrible little devil sent to taint the souls of honest Christian men.

 

“He wants to offer you a deal,” the fairy said with a fanged sneer. “A second chance, to prove you aren’t completely useless. I told him not to bother, but he’s always been stubborn when it comes to relics.”

 

Arthur spit at him. Before the wad could hit his disgusting face, the thing raised two fingers, stopping it in mid air before flinging it to splatter against the books. Looking over to the shadow of Ren, the abomination sighed.

 

“May we kill him now?”

 

Ren pushed off from the windows and sauntered over, hands in his pockets like an insolent child. Five years since his desertion, and the man hadn’t aged a day. _Fairy magic_. Arthur scowled.

 

“The first time we met,” Ren said, as if they were friends commiserating over a pint, “you were everything I’d ever wanted to be. Respected. Powerful, or so it seemed. That turned out to be a lie. But it doesn’t have to be. You can still mean something. Be remembered as more than a sad old man who couldn’t feel the wind changing.”

 

Ren waved his hand, and Arthur felt the enchantment lift. He refused to dignify Ren’s stupidity with a response. He raised his chin, folded his arms over his chest, tried not to remember the way the earth had closed over men and beasts and cannon like clamping jaws.

 

“I’m building something,” Ren continued. “A new Knights of Ren. Magicians who can do more than lob fireballs. Once we know the language, we can do anything. Clean water, cure disease, grow crops overnight. No-one needs to be hungry or thirsty or poor. A roof over every head. Isn’t that the kind of world you want?”

 

“You’re delusional,” Arthur growled. “You’ve let that _thing_ twist your mind.”

 

“Gaius, Ozymandias and Guiomar have already agreed.”

 

“Then Gaius, Ozymandias and Guiomar are going to Hell,” Arthur barked. “I’ll have no truck in your pagan idolatry. You might as well kill me now, if you have the stomach for it, cow—”

 

Something snapped, and as Arthur fell, he realized it was him.

 

Collapsed face down on the floor, unable to breathe, unable to move, numb but to the throbbing ache where his temple hit his stone floor, Arthur saw the fairy’s ruby-studded shoes pad across the floor.

 

“You are far too lenient,” the monster said, voice dimming little by little along with everything else. “If we’re going to take over the world—”

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

The wet heat of India was like nothing Phasma had ever experienced. Her pale blonde hair stuck to her forehead and she had abandoned her frock coat weeks ago, marching through the lines of white canvas tents in her blue waistcoat and her sweat-damp linen shirt. The East India Company men didn’t seem to mind, not as much as the proper British army would have. Some stared, others smirked, but in the last month no-one had tried to slap her on the ass or called her ‘dear’. It was a welcome change.

 

As she ducked into the marginally cooler dimness of her own tent, she shoved her hair back out of her face, and so did not immediately see the man sitting in her rickety camp chair. When she did, her heart caught in her throat.

 

“Ren,” she said slowly, refusing to let her expression change. “How did you get here?”

 

Ren motioned to the tin bowl of water sitting on her desk. Silently, Phasma cursed. Apparently, her new Indian footman didn’t understand English well enough to know what ‘Keep it empty’ meant. Outwardly, she straightened, lording her height over the seated man as much as the low roof of the tent allowed and crossing her arms over her chest.

 

“You have your nerve. There’s a warrant out for your arrest.”

 

“You’re welcome to try,” Ren replied blithely. There was something different about him, and not only the unyielding blackness of his apparel, from his coat to his shirt to the cravat around his neck; all but the bloody star ruby at his throat. He was sharper than he had been. Harder.

 

“No thank you. I enjoy living.” Moving to sit on her bed, Phasma tugged off her boots. “Why are you here? There must be a reason.”

 

Ren considered her for a moment, trailing his fingertips along the edge of the bowl. “Do you remember Badajoz?”

 

 _Of course I remember Badajoz, you bloody numpty,_ Phasma nearly said. Instead, she nodded.

 

“You said that was just how war is,” Ren said, looking down into the gently rippling water. “But it doesn’t have to be.”

 

Setting her boots to the side, Phasma regarded him, cautious and curious in one. “What do you mean?”

 

“Imagine a soldier who doesn’t rape,” Ren continued. “A soldier who doesn’t murder. Doesn’t pillage. Doesn’t need revenge or retribution, who is never cruel or disobedient, who exists to protect and defend, not conquer.”

 

“It’s a nice thought,” Phasma replied. “Men aren’t like that.”

 

“But they could be.” Ren’s eyes raked from the bowl up to hers, not glittering with madness but calmer than she had ever seen them. “I can make an army, Phasma. A perfect army. But I need someone to lead them. I need a captain.”

 

A strange feeling settled in Phasma’s chest; a little like hollowness, a little heavy, a little electric as if there were tiny sparks of static glinting in her lungs. At first she thought it was surprise, but it wasn’t; part of her had always known this was coming, from the moment she saw Ren’s hand. Every magician-king she’d ever studied was missing the same finger. _Fear, then_ , she thought, but that wasn’t it, either.

 

Slowly, Ren stood, his long coat fluttering behind him like a tail of black feathers.

 

“You don’t have to say yes,” he said, extending his hand. “I’ll understand if you don’t. But I need you. You’re the only one who ever had the balls to stand up to me.”

 

 _Excitement_ , Phasma realized.

 

Heart pounding, she took his hand.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

“Good!” Rey cheered, laughing as her fairy twirled her back into his arms. “You’re a fast learner.”

 

Finn grinned at her, his purple-black obsidian eyes glittering. “You’re a good teacher.”

 

As she opened up her mouth to reply, a shimmer rippled through the spinning crowd of dancers. One by one they stopped, turning to look at something on the other side of the tall throne. For the first time in the year and a half she’d been in the Faerie Court, she heard the murmur of conversation, dancers whispering to each other in a gentle din. Finn grabbed her hand.

 

Soon, her worst fears were realized, the crowd parting to let through a pair of tall men decked in white and black. Her heart sunk leaden in her chest. If she’d gone the rest of her days without seeing Ben again, she would have been glad.

 

Spotting them, the men paused, Ben leaning in to whisper in his companion’s — the oft-discussed Fox, she assumed — ear. Fox nodded, and they split apart, Ben continuing his course across to the deep alcove carved into the wall while Fox came towards them.

 

“Don’t talk to him,” Finn advised her quietly. “He isn’t a good person.”

 

Rey nodded.

 

Standing before them, looking from one to the other with searching eyes, Fox said nothing. He was the antithesis of Finn — pale where Finn was dark, thin where Finn was strong, dressed like something out of an old painting while Finn dressed the part of a modern gentleman, handsome in his royal purple frock coat and the black silk waistcoat beneath. Finn wore no gems, and Fox was dripping with them, diamonds woven into the embroidery of his jerkin like beads. Rey disliked him immediately.

 

“Well?” she said eventually, sick of the appraising way he looked at her, like she was an ewe up for auction. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

 

“I wasn’t planning on it,” he replied breezily, tilting his head to the side. “I’m trying to figure out what he saw in you. So far, I’m coming up empty.”

 

Finn let go of her hand and stepped in front of her, standing as tall as he could. Though he was heavier than the other fairy, Fox still looked down on him, amusement glittering in his impassive eyes.

 

“You don’t talk to her,” Finn warned.

 

“I didn’t.” A smirk played on the edge of Fox’s lip. “She asked a question. I answered.”

 

“Let me clarify,” Finn said in a low voice, taking another step forward. “You don’t talk to her _like that_.”

 

Fox split into a sharp-toothed grin, smile cruel and twisted. “Has you wrapped around her little finger, does she? I wonder, has she sucked your co—”

 

Finn snapped his fist into Fox’s mouth. The dancers scrambled backwards, gasping and murmuring, some cowering while others watched with curious gemstone eyes. When Fox brought his hand to his lip, his fingers came away stained with golden red.

 

“Finn!” Rey shouted, an admonishment and warning both as she saw Ben striding towards them like a thundercloud, something clutched in his hand.

 

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing?” Ben snapped, thrusting the tiny glass fox into his fairy’s grasp. “You don’t touch him. You don’t _look_ at him.”

 

For his part, Finn didn’t quail, though his shoulders tensed and his hands curled into tight fists at his sides. “He was talking about Rey—”

 

“I don’t care,” Ben growled, looming over Finn like an angry shadow. “You made him _bleed_.”

 

Looking past them, Rey realized Fox was grinning again, blood on his teeth. She took Finn’s hand again, squeezing tightly, wondering whether she’d learned enough to stand a chance in a fight.

 

“I’m not scared of you,” Finn said, a tiny tremor to his voice.

 

“Really?” Ben asked, his own voice low and angry and murderous. “Because you should be.”

 

When she found out what Ben had done, she couldn’t quite believe the strange, childish man she’d grown so fond of could be capable of such horrors. She believed it now.

 

“ _Ben_ ,” she snapped, looping her arm around Finn’s and standing close to his side. “Stop.”

 

Ben’s eyes flicked to her, sparking for a moment and catching flame. _He’s going to kill me_ , she thought, spells flaring to mind. She almost cast one before Ben turned, stalked over to Fox and put his hands on the fairy’s hips.

 

“Let’s go,” he murmured, pressing his forehead to Fox’s in the same way he’d once done to her. Rey felt vaguely ill. “Let’s just go.”

 

Fox, cradling his little namesake in one hand, slid the other around the back of Ben’s neck, threading his fingers through Ben’s neatly trimmed hair. Then, smiling, he looked out towards the gathered crowd of dancers, every one of them staring in mute anticipation.

 

“We’re rebuilding Starkiller Keep,” Fox called, his voice echoing in the silent ballroom. “You’re all welcome to join us. With a few exceptions.”

 

At the last, Fox turned and looked at her and Finn, smug as if he’d won something. Then, like a shadow before a flaring light, the two of them disappeared. A few tense seconds later, another fairy vanished with them, and another, almost a dozen in total, flickering out one after the other and leaving gaps in the press.

 

Finn laced his fingers with hers. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

 

Rey agreed.

 

\--- --- --- --- --- ---

 

Dragging Hux away from the dilapidated ballroom where the rest of the deserting fairies gaped in open-mouthed wonderment at the ruins and the scattered efforts they’d made to rebuild it, Ben shoved him up against the wall and kissed him hard, blood staining both their lips.

 

“Did he hurt you?” the man asked, running his hands through Hux’s crop of fire-red hair. The fairy smirked.

 

“No more than you usually do.”

 

Ben made an angry noise deep in his throat and kissed him again.

 

A pale finger swiped across the surface of the water. Somewhere a machine churned, gears gnashing and steam belching from sizzling orifices like some great beast. A child reached into the snapping teeth to snag an errant string, moving just a touch too slow to keep his arm from their bite. His scream echoed in the cavernous room.

 

The finger swiped again. Soldiers charged up a hill, swords raised high as men in red coats shot them down in droves. Cannons roared and more men died and like a tide they turned.

 

Another swipe. A hulking lump of metal on wheels slowly chugged down a track, dragging behind it a car filled to the brim with coal. For now, it went around in circles. It wouldn’t go in circles for long.

 

The King smiled.

 

It was time to come home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! It's been amazing seeing your guys' comments. Which is why there is a sequel to this fic in the works! It might take me a month or two, but it's well on the way, so there'll be plenty more of these idiots in the future. 
> 
> If you would like updates about the fic, or if you have any questions (there are 9 million things I didn't get to in the fic that I have detailed explanations for because that is the kind of person I am), I'm squintlysays over on tumblr. :D
> 
> (I've done some art for this and posted it on tumblr. Links below. For further art, come check me out :P)
> 
> http://squintlysays.tumblr.com/post/156017394411/part-two-of-the-do-something-creative-every-day  
> http://squintlysays.tumblr.com/image/155975603611

**Author's Note:**

> If you would like to hang out on tumblr and/or see the inevitable art this monster is going to provoke from me, my username is squintlysays.


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